Terra Mystica Handicapts

tm-faction-handicaps.txt

Well to me bids (at the end VPs) would look like this:

Giants: 0VP
Fakirs: 6VP
Auren: 9VP
Cultists: 12VP
Chaos Magicians: 15VP
Swarmlings: 15VP
Engineers: 18VP
Witches: 21VP
Dwarves: 21VP
Alchemists: 24VP
Mermaids: 24VP
Halflings: 24VP
Nomads: 27VP
Darklings: 30VP

Although the list is different from shampoo's list its alarmlingly close. I have some calculative basis for this, but the project has been frozen for a while.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/977989/quick-and-dirty-race-balance-rankanalysis

Juho Snellman's response:

I would be curious to hear the details of your method. The Nomads in particular seem rather overvalued.

FWIW, if those faction weights were applied to the online game results after the fact, the end result would be even more unbalanced than with no adjustment at all (Nomads only winning 6% of their games, Giants winning almost 40%). I ran an optimizer to find the bids that generate the most balanced outcomes with the current data set. The results are:

giants = 0
auren = 4
fakirs = 5
cultists = 6
witches = 8
alchemists = 10
chaosmagicians = 11
swarmlings = 12
nomads = 14
mermaids = 15
dwarves = 17
halflings = 18
darklings = 24
engineers = 27

This is of course not a very rigorous method, since it doesn't take into account things like the setup, the player quality, or any metagame effects caused by bidding. And I'm sure some of these suggested bids are off badly for a skilled player due to certain factions being misplayed by the masses. But a 25-30vp range certainly seems reasonable.