u/mralphathefirst

I was looking at the latest fit in CivMatrix, and as usual KT it on the top:

• Knights Templar - 57.5%
• Macedonian Dynasty - 55.9%
• Zhu Xi's Legacy - 53.2%
• Japanese - 52.1%
• Order of the Dragon - 51.8%

The obvious objection is that KT is just so strong on water and that is pushing up its estimated win chance. So lets look at only land maps:

• Macedonian Dynasty - 56.8%
• Knights Templar - 54.8%
• Zhu Xi's Legacy - 53.7%
• Order of the Dragon - 52.2%
• House of Lancaster - 52.0%

So yeah, focusing in on land maps only knocks 3% off its estimated win chance. Enough to put it in second place. That does raise the question: How good is KT really on water, if it can have such an effect on its overall win chance?

Lets flip the analysis and look only on water maps:

• Knights Templar - 71.0%
• House of Lancaster - 56.4%
• Abbasid Dynasty - 54.2%
• Chinese - 54.0%
• Holy Roman Empire - 52.8%

Ouch! 71% win chance! That is 15% higher than HoL, which is second place. This does not seem anywhere close to balanced.

But maybe the problem is just that players don't know how to deal with KT on water? We should focus on only top player who know how to handle KT. That will bring the win rate more in line. So lets look at only 2000+ MMR:

• Knights Templar - 80.8%
• Abbasid Dynasty - 59.4%
• House of Lancaster - 58.4%
• English - 54.1%
• Zhu Xi's Legacy - 54.0%

81% win chance is completely obscene! Better players are not better at dealing with KT on water. They just loose even harder. No other civ has ever been this imbalanced. Closest is Zhu Xi's on water in one patch last year.

So yeah. KT on water is completely broken and desperately needs some nerfs.

AoE4World uploaded data dumps for season 13 so I have now updated CivMatrix with the lastest data, and it is so much data. We didn't get a balance patch in the beginning of season 14, so I could include tons of data in the latest model (I do a separate model for each balance patch). This means it went from two weeks of data to almost four months of data.

The old models are still available so you can see how it changed:

• Here is old model with only data from beginning of September: https://civmatrix.com/?state=state-e0b7c38ca27c5820
• Here is new model with all the data: https://civmatrix.com/?state=state-074cd9703491dcfc

Because the map pool has rotated there is not just more games, but many more maps as well.

A few interesting things pop out:

• Knight's Templar knock Zhu Xi's Legacy off the top spot. Knight's Templar win rate rose from 54% to 58%, while Zhu Xi's Legacy dropped from 54% to 53%. I guess part of this might be that we have data for many more Hybrid/Water maps and that is helping bring out KT's strengths.
• Last time Byzantines was the weakest with 46% win rate. It bumped to 47%, and is now above Malian, China, and, at the bottom, Sengoku Daimyo with only a 44% win rate.
• Because we have so much data the plausible ranges for many estimates have shrunk a lot. Zhu Xi vs Jin Dynasty went from 47–56% to the much narrower and higher 46–50%. This is a great example of how additional data helps the model grow more confident on the estimates.
• Looking at 2000+ MMR and land maps only, House of Lancaster falls from 62% win rate to only 57%, which knocks it down to third spot.