Its probably about time I jumped back into writing articles about list building habits. I've just got the latest infusion of data from Armada Warlords fleet builder and I'm ready to see what all of you have been building on your free time. Boy have you guys been busy. I have over 130,000 lists since the end of 2015 to look at.

My game plan to accomplish this massive undertaking, that I'll call "Armada Review, 2017", is to post a segment of analysis/research every week on here until I feel its done enough to be compiled into a report and published as a finished product.

My question for you is this... anyone out there interested in hosting my articles on their blog? I like writing articles but I have zero desire to create and maintain a blog. I'm also opposed to just relying on FFG to keep it available as everything I've written in the past is unreadable from broken image files. So if your interested drop me a PM.

*Side Note* - If any of the other Fleet Builders out there want to contribute their data I'd love to have it.

To start things off someone on the forums asked about the popularity of various objectives (apologies as I don't remember who). Here are the armada objectives broken out by faction and year based on % of lists that included it. Obviously the newer objectives that came out at the end of 2016 weren't around for the whole year so are under represented in 2016. Also 2015 represents only the last 3 months of the year and 2018 represents the first roughly 6 weeks of of the year. As a caveat Warlord requires that you pick objectives in order to save your list and its impossible to differentiate between "actual" and "placeholder", but I think generally speaking given the quantity of lists its looking at should minimize the amount of "noise".

My read through is that although most of the new objectives were duds the ones that weren't definitely helped bring down the massively popular objectives like Advanced Gunnery and Superior Positions.

Well that's all for now and until next time... happy gaming.

My blog was built for this purpose

I got your back. Next time I load up my pc I will start archiving your stuff.

It's a very interesting dataset. I think outside of Solar Corona all of the new objectives really flopped. Interesting to see AG tick back up again. For the most part though it still looks like Most Wanted, Contested Outpost and either Superior Positions or Corona are your default choices.

16 minutes ago, draco193 said:

It's a very interesting dataset. I think outside of Solar Corona all of the new objectives really flopped. Interesting to see AG tick back up again. For the most part though it still looks like Most Wanted, Contested Outpost and either Superior Positions or Corona are your default choices.

For a lot of similar fleets, yes. But Ackbar loves sensor net, as does anything with VCXs/maybe Lambdas. Blockade Run would be very interesting with a Cracken or Mothma CR90 swarm. And planetary ion cannon/capture the VIP are strong contenders for decent objectives that don't hurt you (especially more so than Contested Outpost, ugh).

Yes, Targeting Beacons might have been a misstep, but I think you got a lot more varied fleet types than you'd think just by having those options.

All of the new objectives? I'm quite fond of Salvage Run. True, it's only 80 points, but it does concentrate everything nicely in the center.

3 hours ago, geek19 said:

For a lot of similar fleets, yes. But Ackbar loves sensor net, as does anything with VCXs/maybe Lambdas. Blockade Run would be very interesting with a Cracken or Mothma CR90 swarm. And planetary ion cannon/capture the VIP are strong contenders for decent objectives that don't hurt you (especially more so than Contested Outpost, ugh).

Yes, Targeting Beacons might have been a misstep, but I think you got a lot more varied fleet types than you'd think just by having those options.

Oh I agree. The objectives are what keep every list from getting min-maxed out. And I think you can really leverage some of them, as the Fish Farm demonstrates now.

However, I think way too many of the objectives end up breaking even/ not generating enough advantage. Station Assault almost always pulls even, and I've seen Salvage Run typically go the same way. Close Range Intel and Jamming Barrier don't generate any advantage typically. Ion cannons can help and wont ever hurt really, but they also might not generate anything with good deployment and a little strategic help. Sensor Net you can tend to leverage pretty well, which is why its one of the two new objectives to see a share of growth this year so far. All the others have seen a drop. I think they went a little timid on this batch, which is probably better than going too far. I'd like to see a little re work for some of the Navigational ones, adding a few more VPs to make them a little punchier.

4 hours ago, PartyPotato said:

To start things off someone on the forums asked about the popularity of various objectives (apologies as I don't remember who).

That was me. Thank you so very much!

6 minutes ago, draco193 said:

Station Assault almost always pulls even, and I've seen Salvage Run typically go the same way.

Weirdly I've usually seen them as backfiring horribly and becoming 80 points for player 2, respectively. But that's a result of different metas, really.

It reminds me of something I once heard from an FFG employee about the objectives. "What if someone shows up to an event REALLY practiced with Targeting Beacons, Capture the VIP, and Minefields?" The weird objectives might just need some polish to REALLY shine is all.

27 minutes ago, geek19 said:

It reminds me of something I once heard from an FFG employee about the objectives. "What if someone shows up to an event REALLY practiced with Targeting Beacons, Capture the VIP, and Minefields?" The weird objectives might just need some polish to REALLY shine is all.

Mine fields I think might actually see some life of Raddus fleets become prominent in this meta. Make sure if he drops in he's taking some damage. Capture the VIP is in a tough spot, but is playable.

Targeting beacons is just dreadful. If they would have allowed multiple re rolls it might be workable though.

11 minutes ago, draco193 said:

Mine fields I think might actually see some life of Raddus fleets become prominent in this meta. Make sure if he drops in he's taking some damage. Capture the VIP is in a tough spot, but is playable.

Targeting beacons is just dreadful. If they would have allowed multiple re rolls it might be workable though.

Vader double Cymoon. Place them well, drive hard, you've got extra insurance and your opponent doesn't benefit from them at all.

1 hour ago, draco193 said:

Targeting beacons is just dreadful. If they would have allowed multiple re rolls it might be workable though.

I still don't understand why they even bothered with the two tokens for the first player. They'll pretty much never be relevant unless you go out of your way to fetch them all the way from the opposite edge, which seems like a bad investment instead of moving the ones that are already there. Might as well have just made it two (or three?) and let the second player place both/all of them.

4 hours ago, geek19 said:

Weirdly I've usually seen them as backfiring horribly and becoming 80 points for player 2, respectively. But that's a result of different metas, really.

Backfiring so that player 1 gets 80??? I'm foozed ...

Any chance you can post the underlying data? In a spreadsheet, or comma delineated file, at least?

I'm curious whether the decreasing popularity of some objectives is due to Strategic. I've found there are some that were viable before Strategic, but not are not a good idea, in case your opponent has it...

Edit: I meant Strategic, not Relay!

1 minute ago, Hedgehogmech said:

I'm curious whether the decreasing popularity of some objectives is due to Relay. I've found there are some that were viable before Relay, but not are not a good idea, in case your opponent has it...

Do you mean Strategic? Relay really only makes a difference on its own in, say, fighter ambush.

Itherwise it’s Strategic with Relay just happening to be attached to the things with Strategic ?

Just now, Drasnighta said:

Do you mean Strategic? Relay really only makes a difference on its own in, say, fighter ambush.

Itherwise it’s Strategic with Relay just happening to be attached to the things with Strategic ?

Oops, fixed! Yes, Strategic is what I meant to say.

Approaching this from a design perspective creates some interesting questions when you look at the data. The over all goal would be to create an even distribution among as many objectives as possible. So how do you introduce a new objective that impacts the most popular without further hurting the unpopular ones? Additionally, what do you introduce into the game that would make navigational hazard or jamming barrier more popular?

For those that expressed interest I’ll look at how to share the data files to those that want it. Google docs is a no go as the files exceed google sheets capacity. So please be patient as I look into it some more. Also be advised that the excel file is roughly 100mb in size. So make sure you have a beefy computer or it will crash it whenever you try to run calculations on it.

16 minutes ago, PartyPotato said:

Approaching this from a design perspective creates some interesting questions when you look at the data. The over all goal would be to create an even distribution among as many objectives as possible. So how do you introduce a new objective that impacts the most popular without further hurting the unpopular ones? Additionally, what do you introduce into the game that would make navigational hazard or jamming barrier more popular?

Nav hazards I think if the points were higher would score well. Also maybe change the movement allowance so second play can move 1-3? Nav hazards right now just seems a little too easy to hide from.

Jamming Barrier allows second player to shoot through just as obstructed could help it. Maybe too unbalanced then but as of now it gives basically no advantage.

16 minutes ago, PartyPotato said:

For those that expressed interest I’ll look at how to share the data files to those that want it. Google docs is a no go as the files exceed google sheets capacity. So please be patient as I look into it some more. Also be advised that the excel file is roughly 100mb in size. So make sure you have a beefy computer or it will crash it whenever you try to run calculations on it.

Dropbox I think is the way to go. File size limit is 2gb and 20 gb for free I think.

17 minutes ago, PartyPotato said:

For those that expressed interest I’ll look at how to share the data files to those that want it. Google docs is a no go as the files exceed google sheets capacity. So please be patient as I look into it some more. Also be advised that the excel file is roughly 100mb in size. So make sure you have a beefy computer or it will crash it whenever you try to run calculations on it.

Ooof. I guess I'll forget about that ... Unless somebody can cut it down to only information about objectives.

Unfortunately, the graphs don't do a good job showing the real changes in popularity of the different objectives because the percentages are unweighted. All of the original objectives should fall off sharply from 2016 to 2017, simply because there are twice as many objectives to choose from! While everyone knows this, the graph doesn't show it intuitively.

Halving the values of all of the 2015 and 2016 bars shows real changes much more clearly, since we're interested in the change in popularity of each objective individually. I would also group all of the objectives of a single type together so that it's easy to see how redistribution occurred. Really, three separate graphs would be most useful, since there's no redistribution from one category to another. Finally, a combined (Imperial and Rebel) graph would be appreciated.

Thanks so much for the great work on this. It's an incredible amount of effort, which is why I wanted to get the underlying data instead of complaining!

9 hours ago, elbmc1969 said:

Backfiring so that player 1 gets 80??? I'm foozed ...

Station Assault often results in player one blowing up both of them AND getting the ship win, so player 2 (from the few games I've seen of it) is hindered by bringing it. Ive seen it result in too many losses for player 2 for me to trust it, personally. Maybe Raddus? Maybe?

Salvage Run often ends up showing up in my lists when my opponents for a few games didn't have strategic. So, I got 80 points out of it. Butttttttt then I out the list aside for one reason or another.

1 minute ago, geek19 said:

Station Assault often results in player one blowing up both of them AND getting the ship win, so player 2 (from the few games I've seen of it) is hindered by bringing it.

You wrote that it backfired and player 2 got 80. That didn't make sense to me ... I was suggesting that it should be the other way round (but not very clearly).

50 minutes ago, elbmc1969 said:

Ooof. I guess I'll forget about that ... Unless somebody can cut it down to only information about objectives.

Unfortunately, the graphs don't do a good job showing the real changes in popularity of the different objectives because the percentages are unweighted. All of the original objectives should fall off sharply from 2016 to 2017, simply because there are twice as many objectives to choose from! While everyone knows this, the graph doesn't show it intuitively.

Halving the values of all of the 2015 and 2016 bars shows real changes much more clearly, since we're interested in the change in popularity of each objective individually. I would also group all of the objectives of a single type together so that it's easy to see how redistribution occurred. Really, three separate graphs would be most useful, since there's no redistribution from one category to another. Finally, a combined (Imperial and Rebel) graph would be appreciated.

Thanks so much for the great work on this. It's an incredible amount of effort, which is why I wanted to get the underlying data instead of complaining!

I’m not picking up what you’re laying down by them not being weighted. I understand that 2016 is not perfect because the new objectives where not out for the whole year and I can adjust that. Halving 2015 & 2016 would simply assume that the as of then unreleased objectives would make up 50%. Which they clearly don’t.

If you’re adding up percentages and seeing that they don’t equal 100% its because it adds up to 300% in total. Each category it will equal 100% x 3 categories. But you can’t add across categories... don’t work that way. Example being lets grab the most popular objective from all three categories and it adds up to be more than 100%. Doesn’t work because not every list that took A also took B etc.

Also it may be advantageous to just ignore 2015. Warlords was brand new and still working out the “kinks” and still new so the sample size is really quite small compared to the other years, even 2018 YTD.

Noted on the wanting the objectives grouped by category for an easier comparison.

14 minutes ago, PartyPotato said:

I’m not picking up what you’re laying down by them not being weighted. I understand that 2016 is not perfect because the new objectives where not out for the whole year and I can adjust that. Halving 2015 & 2016 would simply assume that the as of then unreleased objectives would make up 50%. Which they clearly don’t.

I'm just talking in terms of the graphs and the way that our minds interpret them. If you halve the height of the 2015 and 2016 bars, you get a better feel for real popularity changes. The intuitive response to the graphs as-is is, "Wow! Those really tanked in popularity!" The 50% assumption works for this purpose because there are now twice as many objectives.

Trust me, I'm a trained quantitative social scientist and graph theory maven

I had no concerns about adding up to 300%. Not sure where you got that impression.

Keep 2015, even though the sample size is small. They're not extreme outliers.

Again, a combined graph would be informative. I can't derive it because I don't know the ratios of Imperial to Rebel fleets. (Actually, can you pop those numbers out easily?)