So I recently had the idea to keep track of the win/loss statistics for the various powers. I'd like to expand my sample size and see what you guys and gals have been getting.

So if you're willing to keep track of powers involved in your games and if they win, lose, or are part of a co-win I would be very appreciative. This currently has no purpose beyond my curiosity, but I am an undergrad math student, so it may end up being more.

If you send me a message we can go from there. Thanks in advance.

Note: I have an excel file that I can send to you and we can correspond through perhaps weekly or monthly e-mails, whatever works for you.

I'd be happy to participage.... jack @ redamedia.com

The last game we played:

Kamikaze won alone in a game with Healer, Hate, Masochist and Human.

Reserve, Mutant, Zombie, Cudgel. Mutant wins solo.
Hacker, Pacifist, Loser, Trader, Miser, and Sorcerer. Sorceror and Miser win.
Mite, Filch, Warrior, Miser, Pacifist. Mite wins solo.
Hate, Citadel, Virus, Reincarnator, Tripler. Reincarnator and Tripler win.
Remora, Fido, Philanthropist, Kamikaze, and Mirror. Kamikaze wins solo.

Played quite a few more games, but can't seem to remember all the aliens in each. I'll see about keeping track in the future though.

Thank you very much.

I'll post some updates in my statistics when I get a chance. Trying to get at least 3 plays on each power before I make any big assumptions.

In my game, Observer, Mutant, Miser, and Macron. Macron and Miser shared a win with 5 planets and the others had 4 each.

Getting 3 plays on each power minimum seems like it would result in a fairly large sample size, which is good for statistical reliability. it could also be useful for people to self-rate their level of experience with the game, maybe based on something I saw in another thread, and to note if they used any particular house rules. This should help account for more complicated patterns of use with certain powers, if red powers are being used by newer players, for instance, that could skew win/loss ratios. and it's probably a good idea for any data to be solo power games, rather than two-powers per player. could also be worth mentioning if tech was used in the game, at least just yes or no, as a potential factor. I mention all of this after playing a 3 player game where I won as anti-matter, but only because the zombie flare gave me a couple easy colonies and the person with filch clearly wasn't playing to her full potential, ie: stealing the low value cards I was using the win encounters since they would have helped her later against me. The other guy was using Reserve and, despite this being his first game, was playing at a fairly intermediate level, such as using flares in creative ways, using back-handed strategies, etc. The game could have gone very differently had Filch been more familiar with the game. otherwise, an extremely large sample size can smooth over some of the other variables. Oh, I say all this as someone trained in research and statistics for purposes of psychology experiments. To me, anyway, these seem like the few factors it would be important to account for in order to make any results reliable enough to form solid conclusions.

Cosmic has way too many exceptions to be accounted for. I've played about 15-ish games so far with the new set. The amount of players ranged from 4 to 6. Experience level ranged from very experienced to first timers. Some games were only green level, others were mixed. One game was all red level aliens. Some had tech, others not. We might have played a flare-less game once, but I can't remember. I think the biggest variable is amount of players in the game. Offense-only powers like Hate and Mite would presumably perform poorly in larger games. In one five-player game as Hate, I didn't even get a turn, so I essentially played powerless. Though we haven't tried it yet, the 4-planet variant would be another huge variable for some aliens.

Of course, I am not the one doing the statistics, but if I were, I wouldn't burden myself with tracking all the variables. Cosmic is all about chaos, so making exceptions for certain rule sets seems inappropriate. I'd rather a general poll of performance across a variety of circumstance. There are too many variables, especially considering home rules and homemade aliens, to incorporate elegantly into the analysis, I think.

I suppose there's no harm in compiling as much information as possible... once you have a LOT of games, you can get a decent sense of how an alien performs generally, but that's when you start to ask the questions of "how does a newbie playing this power affect the results?" and "What it it's a 3 player game vs a 5 or 6 player game?" and so on. When I was tracking this ten years ago, I used all the data, and I felt more confident with the overall results.

And with the right stats software you can get correlations on a particular power in each of those conditions. Some of the software for running stats is pretty impressive. I do agree there are too many variables to factor out everything, but a few of these seem like things that would just make the data paint a much richer picture. and why not? You have a popular forum here, meaning easy access to a lot of info on a lot of games of Cosmic. What better way to gather that sort of info?

I am happy to share our records. This will be cool as the data builds across all of the contributors games! We play for the beauty of the mechanics, and everyone in our games has loved it win or lose.

1) Zombie in solo win over Mirror and Chosen.

2) Dictator in solo win over Calculator and Pacifist.

3) Human and Trader in shared win over Kamikaze, Warrior, and Spiff.

Cheers!

Crossfire503 said:

It is possible, but there are a lot of factors and simple correlations might not do the trick. If a separate analysis was done for each alien, separately for each possible number of players, other aliens in play, and so forth, it would get confusing.

I expect particular aliens are strictly "better" (the Loser comes to mind) than many, but I think the point of Cosmic is that matchups and the social aspect balance the game out more than any actual balance of powers against each other. Keeping records might be fun, but I do not think they will be particularly meaningful.

The main point of this is just to have a bunch of wins/co-wins/losses by the powers and see where it goes. I am a firm believer that any player can win and any power can win, but it's interesting to see the various powers doing what they do.

For instance in my games Gambler is the "best" power but only has one play, while loser hasn't won a game in 5 or 6 plays.

I hear that. It's interesting regardless of what else is included. I'm just a stats geek thanks to my psychology background.

Just a quick suggestion: you might consider transferring your data to Google docs, and allow people to update it with their stats whenever the feel like it. This would also allow people to just check it out periodically, to see how the numbers were stacking up.

Alright, I put my spreadsheet up on google docs so when you play, you can upload your stats. Note - this sheet is just the stats from people from this forum, not including my own. I will post my own with more data, but I wanted to follow the suggestions I had on here to make it more accessible to you.

I would ask that when you update the stats, either say something on this thread, or shoot me an e-mail which should be in my profile, just so I know to go check it.

Thanks for all the contributions.

Of course it would help if I included the link which is

javascript:void(0);/*1232829701461*/

Hopefully that works.

only game i remember right now would be: gambler, virus, dictator - gambler wins solo

Is there a way to sort by other columns, such as wins or losses? I understand alphabetical is best for default, but if the individual viewer could somehow sort according to his whim like in Excel, that would be nice. I'm not familiar with Google spreadsheets though.

Adam - Not that I know of, I can e-mail you my spread sheet if you want - send me an e-mail - [email protected]

In a game today, we had Grudge, Fodder, Void, and Masochist. Not entirely sure who won, though...I (Masochist, two colonies, four ships in Void with about eight or ten in warp) attempted to Wild Void the Emotion Control that a losing Void (defense) played against Grudge (offense, Fodder as ally, each of those three with four colonies). Discussion ensued of whether the play was legal since Fodder had already taken her ships back after the EC, and I don't know if a conclusion was ever reached. I would guess that Grudge and Fodder shared the win.