I didn’t know how to name the topic
I’m impressed by the idea of analysis of winrates of the different openings by PPPaco.

I think that would be great to obtain information that would answer the question: which castles and strongholds should I take in order to win? Rates could be created for every House for example: 50% of Lannister wins are by tiebreak and Strongholds controlled by him are: Lannisport Riverrun Harrenhal Seagard and Crackclaw Point etc.
I know that it is mostly situational which castles to pick and in regard to Stark and Greyjoy it is really easy to figure it out. But whenever I play Martell or Tyrell or Baratheon, I’m not sure in which direction should I move and to who should be my ally. I usually go in direction of the weakest player (assessing situation on board, not his/her profile) but I wonder which strategy is optimal.
I’m not a programmer but maybe this idea will become interesting enough for one of you to create such statistics.

Last edited by Leniacho on 2019-Jun-07 11:05, edited 4x in total

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I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.

Stark:Win with 7:Winterfell,White Harbor,Moat Calin,The Eyrie,Seagard,Flints finger,Crackclaw point
      Win turn 10:4 castles+Crackclaw Point,with supply of 5-6
Greyjoyyke,Seagard,Flints finger,Moat Calin,Riverrun,and 2 of Winterfell,White Harbor,Lannisport,Harrenhal.Rarely Starfall/Highgarden
      Win turn 10:2 of Riverrun,Lannisport,Moat Calin,Winterfell
Lannister:Win with 7:Lannisport,Riverrun,Harrenhal,Seagard,Pyke,Flints finger,1 of the Reach/Crackclaw Point/Moat Calin
        Win turn 10:2 of Crackclaw Point/The Reach/Seagard
Tyrell:Win with 7:2 ways1)Starfall,Yronwood,Sunspear,1 of KL and Stroms End;(2)Pyke,Seagard,2 of Flints finger,Riverrun,Lannisport,Moat Calin
       Win turn 10:Starfall,1 of KL and Yronwood
Baratheon:Win with 7ragonstone,KL,CCP,White Harbor,The Eyrie,2 of the Reach/Harrenhal/Storms End/Moat Calin/Winterfell
       Win turn 10:2 of Harrenhal,the Reach,the Eyrie,White Harbor
Martell:Win with 7;Sunspear,Yronwood，Starfall,Storms End,the Reach,2 of ccp/Dragonstone/Highgarden/Oldtown/KL
        Win turn 10:the Reach

Thank for your advice, but it doesnt answer the question which strategy is statistically better for Bara/Tyrell/Martell/Lannister When I look at The map I have similar ideas to yours but I ont have both experience and evidence to choose optimal strategy

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I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.

I'll try to answer the question directly, and then explain why I think it is entirely the wrong way to approach things:

1. Stark - Hold the 4 castles and 5-6 barrels of the North, pick off CCP or Flint's Finger with an overwhelming force on turn 10.

2. Greyjoy - While it is certainly doable to win by conquering Lanni, I find going north to be a bit more reliable.  Your sea network is more secure with Bay Of Ice in hand, and it is more difficult for other houses to come and help/contest Stark castles than Lannister's. As far as strategy for taking the North, try to get ahead on the throne track (raiding priority can be crucial, particularly if you can camp a siege support on Stoney Shore) and don't miss a chance to take out the Winterfell garrison, even if it costs you a siege engine. Also be sure to sink any ships in the port whenever you take it; they do GJ no good there.

3. Martell - Toss up. If you can take Tyrell's sea early, that's usually worth doing, but Shipbreaker Bay opens up 2 castles (and Kingswood, which can be crucial). WSS only gives you access to Highgarden, which also tends to have plenty of land support, whereas Dragonstone is isolated enough that it falls easier if you can win one sea battle. Defeating Bara at sea generally requires waiting for Web Of Lies, or some other unlikely combination of events that leaves him highly vulnerable, and its possible that neither will ever come. If you must, be ready to move a land army through the Boneway, either to Dornish Marches or Kingswood. A foothold in either place opens up the possibility of marching on multiple castles that you can't reach by sea.

Lannister - There are different schools of thought, but I have much more success taking Pyke/Flint's/Seagard than holding the Reach/CCP/King's Landing/Highgarden. Like Dragonstone, Pyke becomes much more vulnerable (and easy to hold) once you take one sea, whereas those more central castles remain heavily contested to the end.  If you are going overland, it is essential to maintain full supply to field armies large enough to overcome enemy support networks, and to be aware that your lack of sea transport means that your armies will move much slower than others.  Also the Iron Throne track remains important, as you are much likely to actually hold onto CCP or the Reach if you can raid first to protect additional support for your extended front line.

Tyrell and Baratheon - These houses have the widest variety of victory parameters from what I've seen, although Baratheon wins are 2x more common. There is an extent to which most Stark wins look alike, and Greyjoy and Martell wins come in two basic varieties. But I've seen Tyrell win by way of Riverrun, and Storm's End, and Crackclaw Point, and Seagard, about as often as each other.  Bara seems to fare much better sailing north than south, but your ability to do either is constrained by what is going on elsewhere. Launching a naval campaign is inviting disaster if your other three borders are not mostly secure.  Bara can also win by taking Harrenhall, Blackwater and the Reach, but I find that route a little more difficult and a lot more frustrating. It tends to involve a lot of beating your head against the same wall over and over in the same way, loading up as many troops as you can in CCP and marching them into heavy Lanni supports until you or the Westeros cards wear them down enough to force your way through.

With Baratheon and Tyrell the most certain thing I can say is that the worst castles for them to target are each others. They quickly run into extensive supports, and even if they succeed in making it to the strongholds on the other coasts, their lines are still sandwiched between Martell and Lannister forces that can cut off their support and reinforcement on a whim.



Really, though, I think this entire question is approaching things wrong. You want a default roadmap for how to best achieve victory, but the whole design and beauty of the game (especially 6p) is how the variability of events and alliances punishes rigidity in strategic planning and demands adaptability for optimal results.  Stark and to some extent Greyjoy can succeed with a more single-minded approach, but for the rest you have to be ready and willing to react to the developments on the board, influence tracks and Westeros decks. Having an "optimal strategy" cemented in your head from the start of a game is more likely to hurt your results than help.

And to touch on another thing where I think the OP's approach is backwards, he mentions in passing that he generally tries to target the weakest house. That is the correct move for the very end (probably), but for most of the game you should be doing the exact opposite.  The weakest house is usually weakest because they are being hammered by a strong one, and dogpiling on the downtrodden is likely to extend the invader's lead even further. Preying on the already-weak is a common move among amateurs that are thinking only in terms of securing the next castle.  But you have to think about the big picture, and that usually involves uniting the weaker houses to stop the frontrunner from securing such an overwhelming advantage that it becomes self-sustaining.

To use one example, Baratheon may see an opportunity to take Harrenhall on Turn 5, but he really needs to think carefully on whether his overall interests are better served by that, or having a Lannister that is still strong enough to put up some fight against Greyjoy in the next several turns.

Ser Hodor is hitting the nail right on its head here.

I see somewhat of a schism between players of this game, where one group is very invested in balancing the board state and the other is not. I do believe balancing is almost always the most rational choice until the end of the game (iterative vs. final game, in a game theoretical sense, as it so happens).

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"Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum"

Thanks for a piece of advice . Reason for my question is the fact the once you start a war with someone, it is difficult to stop it. Once I make a decision to invade another kingdom, I have to play with it until the end and have no chance of choosing another enemy. That’s why it would be great to see statistics showing which invasion has higher winrate
Playing Baratheon I usually take Blackwater and leave Lannister alone, so that’s somehow opposite to what I have written before. When I thought for a while I realized that sometimes I try balancing, sometimes I gank.
With my friends I used to play ADWD expansion which I love and playing without balancing actually ruined the game because it was not balanced with the intention of its author.

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I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.

Thanks for a piece of advice . Reason for my question is the fact the once you start a war with someone, it is difficult to stop it. Once I make a decision to invade another kingdom, I have to play with it until the end and have no chance of choosing another enemy. That’s why it would be great to see statistics showing which invasion has higher winrate
Playing Baratheon I usually take Blackwater and leave Lannister alone, so that’s somehow opposite to what I have written before. When I thought for a while I realized that sometimes I try balancing, sometimes I gank.
With my friends I used to play ADWD expansion which I love and playing without balancing actually ruined the game because it was not balanced with the intention of its author.
Face to face has a more fluid movement between war > alliance > war as it's easier to talk things out and react to table talk. When playing online here, it's much more likely to be a war to the end because of a couple of things:

1. You don't know the player and will generally feel more affronted. Consequently people are probably more willing to accept they won't win to ensure the attacker doesn't either.
2. The whispering system permits and indeed encourages secret alliances which will generally result in more people getting dogpilled. This is nigh impossible to do in traditional face to face without intervention from other houses, unless that is, people are texting one another.

Certainly, in our play group we tend to self balance people who start getting an edge, and player elimination is thus more rare until it gets to rounds 9 and 10. Online it's not uncommon to see players (i.e. usually Lannister) eliminated quite early.

Last edited by Jambo on 2019-Jun-10 13:47, edited 1x in total

1. You don't know the player and will generally feel more affronted. Consequently people are probably more willing to accept they won't win to ensure the attacker doesn't either.
2. The whispering system permits and indeed encourages secret alliances which will generally result in more people getting dogpilled. This is nigh impossible to do in traditional face to face without intervention from other houses, unless that is, people are texting one another.

Certainly, in our play group we tend to self balance people who start getting an edge, and player elimination is thus more rare until it gets to rounds 9 and 10. Online it's not uncommon to see players (i.e. usually Lannister) eliminated quite early.
I think you're missing a few things here:

1. The reason people IRL tend to not eliminate Lannister as much in FRIENDLY games is due to the emotional cost of eliminating a player outright. It tilts the direction of it a bit. In IRL tournaments, Lannister is just as likely to get pummelled as in ranked games on this platform - that's my experience.

2. Whilst you are not wrong as such regarding the whispering systems, let us not assume everyone does not install secret diplomacy into the game. Your gaming group enforces what is called 'table diplomacy'. Sure. My gaming group does the opposite, we specifically have 10-15 minutes diplomacy rounds inbetween the regular gaming rounds and permit diplomacy prior to the game when we draw houses 24 hours prior to the game itself. Sometimes we eliminate the 24 hour ahead diplomacy by drawing houses on the spot, but that differs a bit.

3. How much a group of players balance, depends highly upon the local meta - i.e. Thronemaster maybe has one, but is too big for a single balancing meta to exist whilst a gaming group (yours or mine) certainly has one.

My point

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"Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum"

Yep, agree with what you've said.

The only consistent meta in my gaming group tends to be to neuter me, since I know the game and rules better than my other compadres.

We don't do things like pre-diplomacy or secret diplomacy and because it's more about a group getting together and having some fun, early player elimination is rare.

I think that would be great to obtain information that would answer the question: which castles and strongholds should I take in order to win?
Yes, there are lots of questions like these and if you look at other games, like chess for example, statistics is often used and provides a hell lot of information that might not be obvious in the first place!

This site is very well suited for doing statistics with the 10 thousands of games it has. However, accessing those games is very tedious and there is no clear data format which is easily usable. Before I created the post "Openings and their winrates on thronemaster.net" you are referring to, I asked for better accessibility to the game-data:
https://www.thronemaster.net/?goto=community&sub=forum&fid=5&tid=47616#top

Unfortunately, the interest (of the admins and in general) in that was very low and nothing happened in this regard.
I then scraped some games by iterating through logfiles and obtained data which I could easily get: Order placements at the beginning of the game and the winrates. However, if you now want to know which castle was occupied in which turn by who, this is not in the logfiles anymore and you need to dig in the game repeats and track order movements. Which is a mess to do.

So as long as there is no better accessibility to the internal database, no further in-depth statistics within reasonable effort is possible I am afraid..

Such a pitty that access to data is so limited. @PPPPaco your post about winrates was phenomenal. I think that we could learn a great deal more about this game by having enough statistics.

Thank you all for your voices in the discussion, especially PPPaco who enlightened us with his computing analysis of the problem as well as Ser Hodor and pppoe for sharing their experience. If in-depth analysis of routes to victory is impossible, we have to rely on our brain which prevents us from developing Alzheimer's disease . I Wonder how neural network would play each house like AlphaGo in chinese game called go.

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I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.