(Writeup and stats by Delpez. Also our clan, “Supreme Cream!” has a few open spots due to recent roster cleanup. Please mention the blog when applying).

Supreme Cream Performance

During a previous CoC blog post, a comment was made that we should start tracking individual war performance. That sounded like great fun to me – another opportunity to gather and play with large amounts of data! I also didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, because a while ago we played against JTJU, and they already tracked lots of metrics which I took as a starting point. I only used their output sheet to get the metrics – the raw data capturing is manual (takes about 30 minutes per war) and the rest is calculated by a new Excel macro. So a big hats off to JTJU for saving me the trouble of finding metrics by myself. They also have a really cool website and YouTube channel where all kinds of strategies are discussed. We might consider joining their affiliate program – you get a clan advertisement on their site, and also access to various war tools. The most useful seems to be the ‘one tree’ – a decision tree to help decide what attack to use and a checklist on how to execute the attack. If nothing else it’s a decent place to recruit (via the clan add), since players from a site like that usually have an interest in wars and improving their game.

But on to the performance tracker. Here’s a link to a picture of the final output file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1TPRzXrSjCvVENFNEtQXzFudUk/view?usp=sharing

If you want to have a look at the Excel files behind these numbers, just drop your email in the comments or chat and I’ll send it along. The VBA macro and formats don’t seem to play well with Google Drive. I would appreciate any comments, spot checks or troubleshooting; it’s a ton of data, and although I’ve checked as much as I can, it’s quite possible that errors have crept in. So view this as an early beta version.

So what’s the use of this? I don’t think it should become a measuring stick to punish people – as far as I’m concerned, players only need to execute proper attacks (no barcher!) and try to improve. However, this should give you something to measure your performance against. Obviously you can’t compare an early TH8 with a late TH9, so I think it’s best if you compare with your peers. Look at the performance of players with similar experience and TH levels, and see how you match up – or pat yourself on the back if you are already the best! Currently the numbers are organized by TH level, but I may split it into experience level at a later stage. Also, JTJU have seasons and careers stats – I’m thinking of letting a season last for 10 wars, after which the seasonal tracker resets. On to an explanation of the metrics:

Wars: The number of wars a player participated in.

Attacked: Was the player attacked or not in a war? This is a yes or no trigger (1 or 0).

Bleeds: How many times a player was attacked over and above the first. So if you are attacked three times in a war, you score two bleeds. This is an indication of how many attacks are wasted on your base. There are big differences between high and low level bases here, because typically a clan will keep attacking TH8’s until they get 3-stars (or run out of attacks), but usually won’t bleed much against a high level base with some stars against it.

Holds: How many stars did the player manage to hold onto – if your base is 2-starred at the end of a war you score one hold. If you were not attacked you don’t get any holds, but you’re also not penalized in the normalized numbers. Holds are the opposite of bleeds, in that high level bases usually score high holds and low bleeds, whereas low level bases score low holds and high bleeds.

Overall Closer: The first player to score the highest number of stars against a base will get the closer stars for that base. For example, if player A scores a 2-star and later in the war player B scores a 3-star, B will get three closer stars and A none. However, if B also scored a 2-star, A will get two closer stars (he was first) and B none. Overall Closer just means that all attacks are considered, whether the player attacked up, down or sideways.

Overall All Stars: This just adds all the stars a player scored – doesn’t matter if it’s closer, up, down or sideways.

Overall 3 Stars: The total number of 3-stars achieved, irrespective of up, down or sideways.

>= Same Level Closer, All Stars and 3-stars: This tracks exactly the same metrics as before, but you don’t get credit for attacking down.

MIA: Missing in action – the number of attacks a player has missed in wars he participated in. Sometimes a player will miss attacks when opted in by Syncaine to make up numbers. I don’t have a way to track it here, but it is recorded in a separate activity sheet.

In the second half of the spreadsheet these numbers are normalized by using the attacked trigger (for defensive stats) and war participation (for offensive stats). These normalized numbers should be analyzed for any performance based comparison or discussions.

In the context of wars, Overall Closer is an indication of how much a player contributed to the overall war result, while Overall All Stars show how well a player attacks in general, irrespective of the effect it had on wars. If Overall and Same Level attacks look similar, it means the player attacks mostly sideways and up, whereas a significant difference means the player is attacking down a lot. As mentioned before, you should compare yourself with your peers and keep in mind the type of attacks you’re doing. We need players to take out same level bases, but we also need players who hit down and clean up. Issues with players hitting too low should be picked up during wars and addressed in chat – these numbers don’t give enough context to make assumptions regarding the suitability of an attack.

Finally, I really don’t want to mention names (for fear of leaving someone out!), but I do like to point out some numbers as an example of what to look out for. I’ve been tracking performance for the past four wars (last one was Kosarmaniacs), and three of those were non-events. Thus, the values are skewed by players hitting for loot or practicing new attacks. Having said that, Mikrakov’s attack numbers at TH9 is really impressive, and they were all done against same or higher level bases. At TH8 Zelazny is averaging 5.5 closer stars per war, and all against same level bases. Alistair is average 6 closer stars per war – a perfect record! The difference between his Overall and Same Level stats means that some of those attacks were clean-up against TH7’s, but as a low TH8 that’s part of the job. On defense people seem to like Caldazar’s base, even though they struggle to crack it – he has recorded 12 bleeds! Not many bleeds at TH9, but Adam and Saate have both managed to hold onto 8 stars in four wars.

Lots of other interesting stuff, but I’ll let this run for a couple more wars before commenting further. Any thoughts or suggestions?