Tibs said:

It could be a mutually-assured destruction scenario: destroy Azathoth and the world.

Actually, all that's left to get to make this work is some item, power, or such like that cancels an Ancient One's Start of Battle power. Given the usefulness of that against a whole range of Ancient Ones, I would expect a Mission on the difficulty level of Walking The Ley Lines would be about the only fair way to do it. Or perhaps an Inner Sanctum encounter with a difficult Lore check plus sacrificing an Elder Sign.

With that, you get one turn to destroy Azathoth before their attack takes effect and destroys the world anyway.

There's nothing yet that can do it, and I suspect there never will be.

Not to mention our puny human attacks are useless. Better bring down ALL 14 Doom Tokens, because last I check 18-Infinity is still Infinity! And here I thought it was comical overkill. Now I realize it was a back-up plan...

Well there is clue expenditure and "Endurance" that can inflict damage.

However, it does not matter. Azathoth's ability is that if he awakens, the investigators lose. I do not believe there will be an AO ability-canceling effect in the future (that would complicate certain AOs). But once Azathoth's got his sights on something, it's all over.

Ok, I have a quick question about reporting games.

Having two out of the three "big box" expansions for this game, it's impossible to not notice how much the difficulty was increased for the Ancient Ones included in the expansions. I understand the need to provide more difficulty, since the more you play the game, the more your strategies improve, the easier it gets, yadda yadda. But from a thematic standpoint I find it absurd. A wimp like Rhan-Tegoth being more imposing a threat than The Crawling Chaos? Please.

So, to adapt to this when I play with a lot of core box Ancient Ones, I tend to use variants to beef their difficulty some. Especially in the case of Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath. The sad truth is that Nyarlathotep and Shub are pushovers mechanically against the sea of expansion Ancients with ramped-up difficulty, so I'd imagine the data should reflect this.

Realizing that the difficulty of the Ancient Ones is probably one of the more important aspects of this data collection, should I abstain from reporting the games in which I alter their difficulty significantly, in order to preserve accurate data?

I have noticed how nasty the later AOs are. The base game and Dunwich AOs are right at the difficulty I think they should be at.

The primary purpose of the stats project is to show how tough the AOs are. Yeah, you should abstain from posting modified AOs. Luckily though, the revised Cthulhu may be a hint that the other base AOs may be in for a makeover.

Ok. I figured that AO difficulty was one of the most important fields with the data collection. There are so many variants and house rules so widely accepted, I just wanted to make sure I was making the right call by not reporting those type of games.

I would certainly hope for some revised sheets for the core AOs. Most are laughably easy. Cthulhu is one of the few who don't need a difficulty bump. He and Yog-Sothoth are at a reasonable level. All the others could certainly use a bump up. Mostly minor ones would do, like the one for Cthulhu. Nyarlathotep at least needs a huge boost. He's probably the easiest AO overall, which is just wrong.

Official variants would be awesome for them so they could retain their original purpose of introducing new players to the game while also having the option of bringing them up to date with the newer ones, which get tougher with every expansion.

Tibs said:

It'd be wonderful if Miskatonic gave the basic AOs difficulty boosts ;'D Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Hyoushitsu said:

Do you play with Kingsport's Epic Battle cards? Appropriately enough, the Crawling Chaos has the best Sinister Plot cards of any AO,they can really help him in the Final Battle. Also, the Dark Pharaoh Herald makes him considerably more formidible in the final fight if you have a few Masks on the board. Using both Epic Battlehis Herald is the best remedy I can suggest for him.

Solan said:

That's a pretty big if, even seeing one during a game is always a time for cheering. Even if it's usually God of the Bloody Tongue surprising you in an OW encounter...

Dam said:

Last Nyarlathotep game we played I had the Bloated Woman, the Dark Pharaoh, the Skinless Onethe God of the Bloody Tongue all out in Arkham at the same time. How was this miracle achieved, you ask? Easy. When you put the Masks in the monster cup, sprinkle them over the top of the other monstersthen make sure to take the first monster your finger touches when drawing from the cup. I do that every Nyarlathotep gameit usually works.

Doesn't really fit the bill for a randomizer monster cup. Even though my monsters are stored in stacks randomly, I still do several hand gropes in the cup after putting the tokens, before starting the game, just to ensure they are thoroughly shuffled.

Additionally, when drawing, I prefer to reach deep into the bag, shuffle them around some more until I'm left with a stack of three tokens, then take the middle monster of that stackplace it. For monster surges I do the same except draw a stack of tokens in the amount needed for the surge.

Solan said:

I always play with epic battle. Makes the final encounter much more interesting.

The Dark Pharaoh definitely increases the overall difficulty of a Nyarlathotep game, but it's kind of an annoying herald. I don't always feel like playing against him. Even so, I usually will against Nyarlathotep just because without the Pharaoh he's just a pushover to play against. In addition, I usually have him take away as many clue tokens as there are Mask monsters on the sheet during final combat and_I employ various house rules in regards to drawing monsters from the monster cup to ensure that Masks appear a bit more often than normal during the game.

Yeah, a Nyarlathotep game shouldn't be a cakewalk, IMO. He always makes an interesting game now.

Tibs,

Given that Dark Pharaoh is going to get a compete makeover, do you think you should add it as a separate entry from the others under "Expansions Used"?

I've been giving that some thought. I will probably leave the field the way it is, since it's really the same expansion—or at least, it is replacing that expansion.

One thing that could complicate things would be if they add/remove/alter rumors ("Return to the old ways" is pretty toothless as it currently stands).

Investigators efficiency ranking using Tib's reports

Although I am a fan of the statistics reports and want to thank Tib's for such a wonderful effort, they kind of fail at answering one of the top question Arkham players may have: "How are Investigators ranked in terms of efficiency ?"

The obvious correlation between investigtors 'winned games ratio' and the difficulty of the set-up of the games they actually played makes this issue difficult to disentangle.

Of course, a game versus Ran-Tegoth using the Innsmouth board is considerably more difficult than just a base game with a random easy AO.

Technical details

The aim of my statistical model is simply to determine : "What is the fraction of base-game, games using Dunwich-board , games using Kingsport-board and games using Innsmouth board, that the investigators from a given expansion have played ? "

I have obvious assumptions to start with, like "most of the investigators used for base-game only are the base game investigators", and so on. I then iterate from my starting figures to match both the fraction of games played against each expansion board, and the fraction of total games involving investigators from a given expansion. I then compute a 'difficulty bias', using the victory rate against each large box expansion and just base game.

I don't give here much more details, as it does not have a lot of interest for most of the readers.

But what it is interesting is that it allowed to 'remove the expansion difficulty bias " to establish a

F air ranking of the investigators :

1 Patrice Hathaway
2 Mandy Thompson
3 Jacqueline Fine
4 Silas Marsh
5 Wendy Adams
6 William Yorick
7 Rita Young
8 Carolyn Fern
9 Darrell Simmons
10 Trish Scarborough
11 Rex Murphy
12 Wilson Richards
13 Mark Harrigan
14 Leo Anderson
15 Bob Jenkins
16 Akachi Onyele
17 Hank Samson
18 Luke Robinson
19 Diana Stanley
20 Ashcan Pete
21 Joe Diamond
22 Tommy Muldoon
23 Lola Hayes
24 Tony Morgan
25 Ursula Downs
26 Marie Lambeau
27 Michael McGlen
28 Minh Thi Phan
29 Kate Winthrop
30 Harvey Walters
31 Jenny Barnes
32 Zoey Samaras
33 Lily Chen
34 Monterey Jack
35 Gloria Goldberg
36 Agnes Baker
37 Roland Banks
38 Daisy Walker
39 Jim Culver
40 Finn Edwards
41 Skids O'Toole
42 Amanda Sharpe
43 Norman Withers
44 George Barnaby
45 Charlie Kane
46 Dexter Drake
47 Vincent Lee
48 Sister Mary

The results seem logical and legitimate. The top 5 seems straightforward to me (with the exception of Daisy, but we all know that she is clearly under-ranked looser )

An interesting (and surprising ?) side result that we may be interested to hear:

- The best investigators (in average) seem to come from the Dunwich expansion. They are leading before Innsmouthes , that are just doing a tiny little better than Kingsport 's guys, still significantly better than base game investigators, despite Mandy's efforts.

Did you for some reason swap Rita Young and Joe Diamond's places? On Tibs's list they occupy the opposite slots and can't honestly see any reason Rita would be ranked anywhere near Joe, let alone above him.

And let's not forget there's a huge difference between collecting data, and correctly inferring data...

Hey hey everyone. Today, as you know, is the 1st so... time for a

Stats report !

Sorry it took so long to finish. Ordinarily on a Friday I'm home and working on the report by noon, but today I had to... play two games of Arkham!

Also, congrats to Julia for (one again) filling the final spaces on the "Mythos busters" section!

Some of these "placements" are so laughable they make me sad. I will go cry myself to sleep now ;.(

Tibs said:

::smiling::

Tibs:

Have you considered adding a slot or marker for custom investigators/AOs/Heralds? Obviously it'd be impossible to maintain a full list of those, but maybe just a write-in slot in each section or just a check mark for "used custom"?

It's be nice to be able to include this type of info but it would likely skew the other info since custom covers such a broad spectrum it would be impossible to tell it a loss was thanks to a particular ancient one or herald or some overdone custom work.

Tibs,

have you ever thought about the possibility of calculating stats for expansion boards combo? I mean, on the stats we have the difficulty of Innsmouth, Kingport & Dunwich, but it's not said how these expansions affect each other. Maybe it could be interesting checking Innsmouth board only games, as well as Innsmouth + Kingsport and Innsmouth + Kingsport + Dunwich (after all, we should have only six possible board combinations + the "AH only game")

Julia said:

seven.

1. dunwich
2. kingsport
3. innsmouth
4. dunwich + kingsport
5. dunwich + innsmouth
6. kingsport + innsmouth
7. dunwich + kingsport + innsmouth
(8. ah only)