UK Nationals, crunching the numbers

After last months article on Crunching the numbers – ETC 2022, I thought it would be fun to take a look at another big event and see if the trends from ETC would show up again in this set of data.

Breakthrough Assaults own Mark Goddard was the TO for the UK Nationals that took place at Battlefield Hobbies and was kind enough to use a score sheet similar to the one used at the ETC making it easy to run the same analysis on the data.

Nations and Formations.

The UK Nationals saw 36 players play 5 rounds over 2 day. The players was allowed to bring 2 armies, one red and one blue to ensure the matchups was always red on blue. For this overview I have chosen to count the armies the players had noted as their main army in the cases where a player had brought 2 armies.

As you see in the two diagrams above the Germans and Americans was by far the most common making up 24 forces out of 36 players. Just like at the ETC only a small about of players chose Finns, Romanians and Hungarians so results for these nations are connected with huge statistical uncertainties. But just like at ETC the big 4 is in the same order Germans and  US in front with UK and Soviets coming in as 3rd  and 4th with the Soviets being fielded by remarkably few players compared to the other 3 nations.

When determining the Force/Formation type, I counted the main body of the Force so a small infantry formation with massive armoured support is still an infantry formation and in cases where player brought multiple formations I counted the most point heavy. So if a player had an infantry formation worth 25 points and a Tank formation worth 45 points I counted the Force as a tank force.

If you take a quick look at the Formation spread we see that Tank formations are very popular and make up half the forces fielded. This is in line with the general perception that FOW is a tank game. The biggest surprise for me is that Mech formation isn’t more popular, but that might be because Brits won’t have theirs before Bulge arrive and that US armoured rifles have a hard time with Bazookas assaulting on a 5+.

Wins.

Now I will take a quick look at number of wins per nation and wins divided by stance. Below you can see the average number of wins per nation. Compared to the ETC this is significantly higher. At ETC the best Nation(British) won 1,83 games in average but at the UK Nationals the US Players won 2,5 games in average, followed closely by Germans with 2,4. 

When looking at wins by stance attack, once again takes the lead. Just like at ETC, Attack was responsible for the most wins, but at ETC it was 42%, but here at the UK Nationals Attack is responsible for just over half of all the wins, followed by Defend with 32,9%. Manoeuvre is left behind with only 16,5% of the total amount of wins. Why is this so pronounced? My personal opinion is that manoeuvre lists often end up sitting between two chairs. They can neither fully attack nor can they fully defend.

Missions.

When we look missions and who end up as winners, we have to remember that the numbers we looked at above and in the ECT article point to that Attackers are at an advantage to begin with. So which missions stand out. Counterattack is just like at the ETC a problem. At the UK nationals 5 games of Counterattack found a winner all being the attacking player. At the ETC, the number of Counterattack missions with a winner was 7 with 5 wins for the attackers. The mission with second most unequal winner distribution is Valley of death with 5 games played and 4 wins for the defender. Compared to ETC were Valley of Death found a winner 15 times, with 9 to the attacker and 6 to the defender. So if we add up the wins in Valley of Death from both UK NAt. and ETC the distribution is 10 wins for the attacker and 10 for the defender. So what at the ETC looked like a mission with problems seem to be fair enough when the UK Nat. data is added in.

The last thing I have made a diagram over is how the games reach their end. Not remarkably the most common way is by taking an objective, as the attacker wins have the games taking an objective should be the most common. Funnily enough this is exactly the same number as the ETC 47,7%. Other than that the biggest difference between the two events is that only 12,5% timed out at the UK Nat. compared to 27,3% at the ETC, despite the ETC having longer rounds. This might be because, it is more important not to lose at the ETC than at the UK Nationals, where as a singles tournament winning is everything if you want to finish high.

Conclusions

The point of all this math and diagrams is to see if there are some trends and points of interest in FOW as a tournament game. What is see as the most important lessons from the UK Nationals is the Attacking is still the best way to go if you play to win, with over half of all wins done by players using the Attack stance. What is important to remember is, that at the ETC each stance was used an equal number of times, but at the UK Nat. that is not the case.

On the nation side it seems that the top nations is US, Germans and UK with Fins also up there, but with only one finnish player that is very hard to draw any conclusions on that. It is thou of interest that the UK lists was the lowest average scoring of the 3 “good” ones.

Other than that we have the missions, where once again Counterattack is highly in favour of the attacker, but in most other missions it seems they are pretty fair, if we forget the general advantage of the attacker. Maybe all we need is to give the defender 65-70% on table troops to see the winrates level out between the attacker and defender.

Until next time, happy hobbying.

Soren.