Empires & Puzzles - Mana Speed in War Defense 

Thank you! This was surprising data for me and will help my Alliance keep improving our War performance. You have already helped us improve already. Also the graphics were great! Loved the dark background and color choices. Really easy to read on my small tablet. I appreciate and understand the amount of work and time that goes into these Ssnake and admire you for doing this and sharing it with our community. Calico Penny

Sound logic… gave me confirmation of Khufu / Penolite on my defence create more problems than the faster heroes 🤷🏻‍♂️🤣 & made me re-think my defence approach ! Good one👍

Amazing what analysing data can uncover. Thanks for your hard work.

Glad your back buddy!!!

Such a great video! Love these so much. Thank you for this Snake. My apologies if you addressed in the video, I was listening on low volume in the vehicle I was in and may have missed a couple things, but do your mana scores account for the impact of mana boosting troops?

Thank you for doing this. It is very enlightening. I don't have a deep roster, so I have to make do.

Excellent information. But I do agree it is the certain heroes that are on the slower end and that are making those numbers. For myself I have noticed going with 4 slow and one average that has a mana boost somewhere in there special is the most effective. Seeing fast heros and Snipers on our defense war end makes me cringe. That's a perfect way to Lose everytime. Looking forward to seeing the breakdown of certain heroes.

Informative and thought-provoking as always. I wonder if that bulge in the normal mana wars may be related to opponents underestimating a slow mana team. They use their best heroes on the fast mana teams and the second-tier heroes on the slow mana teams. There are also some incredibly strong slow mana heroes like Xnolphod. Looking forward to the positional analysis.

Have you done this recently with the massive increase in hero power on the new meta? Feels like you could get away with more slow heroes previously but now with these Uber powerful fast heroes the dynamic has shifted.

Thanks! Watched all your others, often multiple times. Does the source data record the identity of the defender? If so, you could break down the analysis of distribution in terms of unique players. This could help identify whether you have a player on your team who puts out an 11 speed team and their particular setup works (ie the spike is one player). Perhaps you could just eliminate your team's defenders and see if the spike is still there? Or if you dont record player identities and cant exclude your team's data, how about just looking at the 25 instances of teams at mana speed 11 - is it 25 unique layouts? Is it overwhelmingly an Alfrike tank? Interesting stuff!

Certainly interesting to think about. Obviously that spike makes no sense at all and should be investigated. I do not believe any random team of mana speed 11 will do significantly better than everything else. A few things that I could think of that might be worth looking into: 1. as @OLO says: it might be a particular player who uses the same team all the time, because it is obviously very good. I don´t know where your alliance is in terms of rankings, but outside the top a lot of people may lack the killing power to kill slow heroes before they fire. so a team of Khufu/Goseck etc would cause serious trouble. I know I would have trouble fighting that. I might manage to kill one of them, but 2 or 3 spread around? highly unlikely. 2. Mana speed 11 sounds like 1 avg+4slow? Is that pre nerf Xnolhod with Khufu etc an option for the culprit? Or same idea with other mana speed boosters, in which case slow heroes aren´t really slow anymore. And since slower heroes tend to benefit more from mana boosting than faster heroes, it would make sense in a way. But the important point would be mana boosting. 3. I assume there is not a ton of data for mana speed 11. How many occurences are we talking about and if you look into it, how many different teams is that (coming back to point 1)? The same I would do for the very fast speed. 4. The dip at the very fast end is not very surprising, there simply are very few strong heroes in very fast speed. I can´t see many people even bothering to try to put up a very fast def and you can see not a single VF hero in the current meta defs for a reason. So I would expect the max performance somewhere around a team consisting of all fast heroes or less, certainly not higher. At top level w3k defense would most likely pull that speed optimum lower than that, again due to the giant mana boosting of w3k, not the slower speed in itself. This might change if we keep getting more strong VF heroes, like Horus and Alucard. Right now you are looking at a set of heroes that simply doesn´t work as a team on defense: most are red and purple (so using multiples makes you weak to colors from the start, most are snipers which is close to the worst type of hero on defense and the multihitters are toolboxes and do hardly any damage at all. It´s not possible to build a strong defense team from that. So I think that dip can be ignored. it has nothing to do with that mana speed being bad, but with the fact that too few heroes of that speed have the qualities necessary for defense.

Ssnake! Glad to see you back. Great info here. I’m seeing true above average success leveraging your videos. Of course, even as a mostly free to play, with some pay about a year ago, I’m blessed with a reasonable number of top heroes. Just curious, what has your study revealed about element (color) composition? Is Rainbow king? Is there another composition showing any surprising results?

Could it be that the slow spike is the W3K meta with 3 average and 2 slow heroes?