I saw @Brunas ' call for help on Reddit to help filling in the lists for NOVA (thank you to everyone helping!)

Instead of helping myself I had a first look at the complete Top64. [Full Album]

About the ships: The Top64 put a total of 178 ships on the table. That's 2.8 ships per squad, which is a small decrease since the 2.9 of Worlds this year. The exact distribution is shown in this first graph:

The three ship squad is still the most frequently seen. But the relative portion of 2 ship squads massively increased from 25% at worlds to now 35%. Also the 4+ ship squads increased from 9.5% at worlds to now 12.5% at NOVA. I'd expect that trend to continue with e.g. the Silencer, but 3 ship builds are still a bit more than 50%.

The 178 ships are combined by just 31 different chassis (or 34 due to Y-Wing, Scurrg and HWK from two factions). That is very similar to the 33 different ships at worlds.
It is interesting to note that 54 of these 178 (30%) are large base ships, a clear decrease from Worlds (38.7%).
If we take a look at small high HP ships (which I define here as 8 or more hull+shield), we see a massive change! Worlds had12%, but NOVA had 28% of them!
Combining large and highHP ships, they are now 58% of all ships compared to 51% at Worlds.
Of these 178 ships, just 42 (23%) were generics compared to the 29% at Worlds.

That piechart above shows that the reign of Jumpaster+Fenn is broken or at least vastly reduced. It is no comparison to worlds. It is interesting to see how Scurrg, K-Wing, Jumpmaster, Shadowcaster, X-Wing (=Biggs) and Auzituck are prevalent but not extremely dominant. (It also illustrates why pie charts above a certain number of slices suck!)

It is better to see when looking at the top16:

The previously mentioned ships are now clearly dominating: the mentioned make up 32 ships out of 45! Before it was 87 of 178. A noteworthy absence IMO is the fairship rebels build.

This graph shows that the PS wars are back! Again the comparison to worlds is interesting where 8 and 9 were very frequent.

That means the first findings are that the trend towards beefy unique high PS pilots in 2-ship lists continues, but FFG offered an alternative to large ships.

About used upgrades: We see that Crew, EPT, Mod and Title are the most popular slots, which looks pretty similar to Worlds. Careful here though: Crew often comes with more than one slot per ship.

About the faction distribution: Rebels and Scum are pretty evenly matched, with imperials lagging behind. But it's not as bad as it was at worlds .

About squad compositions:

This plot shows which ships were combined. The size of the letters depend on the individual ship cost.

About the distribution of ship cost:

This boxplot shows the builds in a bit more detail. We see that Lancer, K-Wing, Scurrg, Jumpmaster, ARC and YV666 have a very high variation meaning they can be built in various ways. This is of course skewed due to low amounts of ships for some. But there are also those like the Y-Wings or Fangfighters where one build is just very common and there is almost no alternative to it. I was personally surprised by the small box of the /SF.

I will later update this post when I get home, and I'm happy to take suggestions.

Edit: finally got to make the PS distribution and exact squad size distribution

That's a lot to chew on....I'll digest it, but first glance looks right ?

2 hours ago, clanofwolves said:

That's a lot to chew on....I'll digest it, but first glance looks right ?

I added some more in case you already finished chewing

2 hours ago, clanofwolves said:

That's a lot to chew on....I'll digest it, but first glance looks right ?

Can't be worse than your Wookiee steak! *buh dum tis*

Yeah, Statistics yeah!!!

So if I am reading this correctly, the TLDR is the meta is shifting towards 4 ships of average PS or 2 ships with high PS?

Oooooo, this would be a great thread for the [Meta] tag

BTW, 2 ships ain't a squad. . .it's a date.

7 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Oooooo, this would be a great thread for the [Meta] tag

done, I like tags

7 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Oooooo, this would be a great thread for the [Meta] tag

BTW, 2 ships ain't a squad. . .it's a date.

Potentially a double date, in the case of some two ship builds featuring crew.

Swarm is dead.... Even small one

What we can conclude: Nym and Lowrisk are so powerful that they managed to break the JMK dominance. So yeah, solving OP with more OP...

21 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

That means the first findings are that the trend towards beefy unique high PS pilots in 2-ship lists continues, but FFG offered an alternative to large ships.

Yeah, they made a small base ship with large base stats, crazy offense and low cost.

I believe I finally found an interesting way to further look at the different squads, particularly which pilots go together.

I did the same for ships instead of individual pilots. See the full album here.

edit: my next idea is to combine this with the average build cost. Could be interesting, but might get too much at once

I saw the original post and didn't find it too useful, but those relationship charts are very interesting.

Well yes, the rest is very basic. But I'm a bit proud of the networks, I think they display a tournament in a new way and allow us to see many connections at a glance

I like those interrelationship charts, they're a really interesting outlook into how lists go together.

I'm particularly taken with the Scum one with Ketsu Bossk as a complete outlier with no other combos for either ship.

I suspect that's not completely accurate (double shadowcasters are a rare thing but a difficult one to fight against) but it's funny nonetheless.

It's just from one tournament.

I would like to combine all 2017 nationals into one chart if the data becomes available. That could be very interesting

1 minute ago, GreenDragoon said:

It's just from one tournament.

I would like to combine all 2017 nationals into one chart if the data becomes available. That could be very interesting

it really would be.

Maybe this method of charting could be incorporated into meta-wing?

I don't think it's stable enough for that tbh, nor is it polished enough

You'll notice that I renamed Captain Nym to Rebel Nym or Scum Nym because he broke the chart even though I thought I had included faction as necessary qualifier. There will be other, similar problems I assume. Nobody flies Sabine, but she could break it, too: 3 ships in two factions? Nope, doesn't work

Poor poor firesprays...

10 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Maybe this method of charting could be incorporated into meta-wing?

To give you an idea: this is what it looks like if I don't distinguish Scurrgs or TIEs

It would be the whole current wave11 meta from metawing. But it's also 1:20 am here and I need to get up in few hours, so... *ohgodwhydidIdothat*

Edit: And this, at 2am, is the corrected plot