Winners and Losers in Middle-Earth

Having played in Middle-Earth for over a year now, I've become interested in finding out just how balanced the game really is. Which allegiance is most likely to win? Which nations are the most powerful, and which are particularly weak? Do the Neutrals wield too much influence, as some players claim? And was the change in agent orders really necessary to correct an imbalance?

Prior to this time, there was insufficient data to provide an informed answer to any of these questions. Opinions given by various players were based upon guesswork, hearsay, and complaint, often with little or no evidence to support anything the player said. Indeed, mist players had no experience beyond the few games they happened to be playing in, meaning that they couldn't possibly identify any sort of pattern from their limited exposure to Middle-earth(though a few made some pretty good guesses).

With the December 1993 issue of Whispers, this has changed. Enough games have ended to provide a solid basis for establishing some general trends and to take a shot at answering these questions. Working off the numbers given by GSI for wins and nation placement, there's now a minimum amount of data to make this article possible.

The Data

Since the spread of data is still relatively small and subject to error, this operates on the premise that any nation which has placed 2-5 times is running about average. A nation which places 0 or 1 times is considered a 'loser', while a nation which places 6 or more times is a 'winner'. Nations break down as indicated below, with the number of placements following in parentheses:

Free Peoples

Dark Servants

Neutrals

All other nations took a winning slot an 'average' number of times.

The Balance of Power

Yet despite the advantages the Free possess, the manage to win the game only 39% of the time. This can't be attributed to incompetence or exceptional Dark Servant play; there must be some aspect of the game which favors the Dark Servant nations. This is even more apparent when you take into account the fact that a nation like the Witch-King scores a winning position just as often as most other nations do, despite being surrounded by enemies and isolated from the rest of Mordor.

What is the mystery factor? A number of players claim that Dark Servant agent advantages in combination with their artifacts unfairly tip the game away from the Free. As the Cloud Lord has scored the second-highest number of wins overall, there may be some evidence to back this up. Yet if this is true, why aren't the nations mist likely to suffer from agent attacks (again, the Gondors, Eothraim, and Northmen) all losers? Perplexing, to say the least.

If I were to hazard a guess (and a guess is all it is), I'd say that agents are indeed the primary reason for the preponderance of Dark Servant wins. GSI, with it's inestimably much better information, saw fit to make changes to the agent orders; this seems to indicate that they too believe this to be at least one of the determining factors in the imbalance of victories between the allegiances.

The Losers

While the Dragon Lord position lends itself to easy criticism, the others do not. None of the four are by any means helpless in comparison to their opposition, nor do they have identifiable weaknesses. The Woodmen, for example, have no nearby enemies except for the Dragon Lord; once this Dark Servant is driven from Mirkwood, they can enjoy a peace dreamed of only by neutrals, with plenty of room to expand. They same can be said of Cardolan; this nation is often spared the direct and brutal attention of the Witch-King and his potential allies, yet has only managed to place a single time. Arthedain, on the other hand, is the prime target of Angmar; even so, that nation has manages to place four times.

Arguments have been made that the Eothraim are particularly susceptible to attack by Mordor. This is true, but the same can be said for the Northmen. Why then are the Eothraim losers and the Northmen not? Why also has Rhudaur alone of the five neutrals never managed to take a winning position? No easy answers suggest themselves. I can only point out which nations seem to be particularly disadvantaged; others will have to suggest explanations for these results.

The Winners

There are some interesting anomalies. Note that among the allegiance players, the two of the three winning nations are almost completely character-oriented; only the Long Rider could (with some stretch of the imagination) be called a military nation'. In fact, the winning nations that truly qualify for this distinction are both neutral, and both are located in the same general area.

The question is, do isolation and/or neutrality really count for that much? The Easterlings have the exact same advantages as their neutral neighbors, as does the Blind Sorcerer with respect to the Cloud Lord and Long Rider; yet neither of these nations are winners. Again, some other factor or factors must be at work to give these nations an edge.

The Neutrals

Since there are five neutrals in the game, you'd expect that they'd take about 20% of the winning slots on average. In truth, the neutrals garner closer to 30% of these slots; somewhat higher than average, but certainly not high enough to set off any warning bells. In fact, considering that neutrals often remain intact in terms of their resources during the opening moves of the game, and spend the initial turns building up these resources rather than expending them against the enemy, you'd reasonably expect them to last longer than other nations and so reach winning positions more often. But even these numbers lend no credence to the claim that the neutrals are 'always winning the game'.

The primary complaint concerning neutrals (other than the ludicrous insistence that they shouldn't exist at all) is that they affect the balance of power between the allegiances far too much. This is rather easy to disprove. In a recent survey of 34 games with 170 neutral positions, the allegiance chosen by 102 of these neutrals was reported as follows (others had yet to change allegiance or had dropped the game prior to changing allegiance):

Nation		Reported 		Free Peoples		Dark Servants

Corsairs	18			8 (44%)			10 (56%)

Haradwaith	20			10 (50%)			10 (50%)

Dunland		20			15 (75%)			5 (25%)

Rhudaur		23			13 (57%)			10 (43%)

Easterlings	21			9  (43%)			12 (57%)

Total Free Peoples:		55 (54%)
Total Dark Servants:		47 (46%)

Note:  Information on 27 of these games was provided by Jeremy Richman, a 
       long-time veteran of ME-PBM.

You'll note that all of the neutrals except the Dunlendings tend to break out relatively evenly among the allegiances, and that among neutrals overall there seems to be a slight tendency to favor the Free Peoples. If neutrals had as much sway upon the game as some claim, their power should result in a balance of games won that stands close to even between the allegiances. Yet we know from the data that the Free win only 39% of the time; clearly the neutrals aren't affecting this, other than perhaps in letting the Free win more often than they would if there were no neutrals in the game at all. In other words, any affect the neutrals have on the game is usually minor (there are obvious exceptional instances, e.g., when all five neutrals go to one allegiance) and doesn't appreciably alter the balance of power between the allegiances.

Nation		Wins			Free People		Dark Servants

Corsairs	11*			2 (20%)			8 (80%)

Harad		9			2 (22%)			9 (78%)

Dunland		4			3 (75%)			1 (25%)

Rhudaur		0			-			-

Easterlings	4			1 (25%)			3 (75%)

*placed second in one game, put failed to declare prior to game end.

The information here confirms the breakdown given above. If neutrals did have a great deal of influence on the outcome of the game, they'd tend to win in numbers equal to their rate of declaration for either side. Yet aside from Dunland, most neutrals win the game only when fighting for the Dark Servants; they most often lose the game when they declare for the Free Peoples!

What does this suggest? The impact that any one neutral has on the chances of an allegiance winning the game is much smaller than generally believed. However, for three of the neutrals, joining the Dark Servants provides benefits that often allows them to take victory; for Dunland, these benefits are provided by the Free Peoples. In other words, declaring for the right allegiance is worth much more to the neutral is worth to the allegiance.

Conclusions

Many questions on the 'whys' of victory and defeat can't be answered by an analysis of the data only offered up for thought. Few things can be said with certainty:

• some nations win out of proportion to the average nation; others lose more often than they should.

• even under the old agent rules, the Dark Servants weren't unbeatable. Far from it, in fact.

• a competent Free Peoples team won't win the game every time, despite their advantages in economic power and the regional disparities versus the Witch-King and Dragon Lord.

• nations that one might expect to be losers (e.g., Northern Gondor, Northmen, Witch-King) were not, suggesting their strengths are fairly well proportioned for the opposition they face.

• neutrals aren't winning the game vastly out of proportion to their numbers.

• the affect that neutrals have upon the balance of power among the allegiances is much smaller than previously thought, and tends to even out both across games and in individual games.

This article can only tell you what's happening with respect to the questions initially proposed, not the reasons behind the results. I leave interpretation of the 'whys' up to my fellow gamers, and invite criticism and commentary. However, I'd ask that all criticism of the results be based upon the data, not upon unsubstantiated personal belief or experience, or upon the anecdotal experiences that begin with "well, this happened to me in game such-and-such once...".

Until Ren the Unclean takes a bath,
Tom Walton