Win-rate Stat Dump: The Battle Force Meta?

In this article I’m going to be looking at Battle Forces and how they are performing in the meta. When AMG announced Battle Forces, they said they were not being built to be competitive: Some would be good and others would be just pure theme based. With the help from Krzysztof Trojanowski aka Derrkater on Discord. I’m going to look into win rates of each faction and the breakdown of why their Battle Forces might be under, or over, achieving.

We last discussed the previous meta here on 5th Trooper by Lucas Ustick. This was over a year ago now and we have so much more data available to us from over 3600+ games! I want to say a big thank you to Derrkater for gathering all this data and the depth he records at to give us the opportunity to start discussing the game at this level.

For reference, this snapshot is looking at the games played between 8th June 2023 and 28th November 2023.

Is the meta healthy?

The game itself is very much alive. It has new releases coming and from what has been discussed we have years of new releases to come from what has currently been developed. I think this can also be seen with the number of tournaments that are on GameUplink. Which currently sits at 237 events with an attendance of more than 20 players! This is just going to continue to grow!

The game is continuing to grow at a fast rate. One of the reasons might be due to the balance of the meta. Faction win rates are sitting close to 50% with all factions within +-5%. which is perfect for a game state and meta. Nothing is worse than having to buy the latest releases to stay competitive due to huge power creep.

When we split into pure factions vs battleforces, we firstly see that pure factions occupy all four bottom spots of the table and three out of four have a negative win rate. Then all battleforces have positive win rate and five of them pass that 55% threshold

When we split lists into Battle Forces and pure factions. The main factions form the bottom four and Shadow Collective sits five spots above the original factions. Naturally, this is raw data and thus should be considered with caveats. An obvious one is that when this data was collected there wasn’t yet much data on the two new Battle Forces (Wookiees and Experimental Droids) that were revealed/released in the fall.

Empire Battle Forces

Blizzard Force

Let’s get the most obvious controversial discussion out of the way first. Blizzard force is high in that list of breakdowns. A lot of this might just be because a lot of the best players were using it for worlds and the lead up to. It could also be that the Battle Force itself is really strong no matter who plays it.

A few brave players have tried not taking HRU’s at all but with the small sample set they only managed to win 13 out of 33 games. There is also interestingly an 11% increase in wins if you take Veers rather than a generic officer.

The win rates of Vader in Blizzard are 57% while in normal empire is 52% so not a big difference between the two lists. Bikes sit at 56% win chance in Blizzard while outside they have a 46% win chance. Now this could be because you can take four bikes in Blizzard force but does one extra unit really give you an extra 10% win chance? Quite possibly, that extra bike increases the chance of drawing one by 33% after all, which is huge in the early game.

If we look at Veers in a normal Empire list, we have a 43% chance of winning vs 56% in Blizzard so by taking the same commander with the same archetype but in a Battle Force gives us an extra 13% chance. Maybe the extra bike does give you 10%? Perhaps the battle cards or HRUs still give most of the swing? Then, if we compare the AT-ST in Blizzard we have a 56% win chance the same as Veers which would make sense since he pairs well with double AT-ST. While in a normal empire list AT-ST’s have a 29% win chance!

Imperial Remnant

If we look at the top performing Battle Force, we can see that even units that are performing sub-optimally in the normal Empire lists are over-performing in this Battle Force. Let’s look at the E-Web that normally has a 42% win rate while in Imperial Remnant we have Independent Aim or Dodge and this gives the E-Web a 66% win rate. Now the number of lists that have taken the E-Web in this Battle Force is nearly the same amount of games that have won with an E-Web in normal Empire so is a small sample size.

Let’s look at a slightly bigger sample size in the Battle Force of speeder bikes, which saw a 10% performance increase in Blizzard Force and gets a sizeable increase here as well, despite only being able to carry two of them.

Imperial Remnant can only have a choice of 9 different units when list building but not a single one of them has a lower win percentage then if you took that unit in a normal Empire list. The interesting thing to note is the smallest gain in win percentage is 11% while the greatest is 24%!

Tempest Force

This is the newest Empire Battle Force and has only two games less than Remnant but still carries a 54% win rate. With even fewer unit options available to them it’s not a surprise to see most units having a similar win rate as the faction. The only exception to this is the Generic Officer who has a 60% win rate vs Major Marquands 52% but he does have five times the amount of games over the Generic Officer.

Republic Battle Forces

501st

As with the previous two Battle Forces, if the unit selection options are quite limited then the win rate of units tends to be quite close to the Battle Force as a whole win rate which makes sense. So how can we look at this data to help us with list building or what to expect when we face these forces. It will be the small differences that matter. For instance, If I take Rex as my commander then I only have a 53% win rate vs someone who takes Anakin who has a 59%. While if we look at Rex outside of the Battle Force, he has the lowest win rate overall with 27%!

As far as this Battle Force goes it does not get any extra tokens for free but can take fewer corps and spend more points on the ARC troopers. When we compare the win rates of the full ARC squads in a normal republic list of 51% vs the win rate in the Battle Force of 57% it’s not as big of an increase as one might expect. The same applies to the strike team as well with only a 6% difference in favour of the Battle Force.

501st must take a support option and has a choice between a BARC or AT-RT. In a normal Republic context it’s very rare you would see these across the table in a competitive list. Rightly so with the AT-RT only having a 37% win rate and the BARC having a slightly higher win rate of 46% but this is probably higher due to the Yoda triple BARC that was being used quite successfully earlier in the year.

Both of these units have an increase in win rates in the Battle Force but if I’m list building the stats state that the BARC gives me an extra 19% win rate over taking a AT-RT in my list.

Wookie Defenders

We don’t have much data available for this Battle Force but from the small sample set we can already see that they are very formidable, time will tell if they end up above the curve

Rebel Battle Forces

Echo Base Defenders

As we move away from the red save armies towards the softer white save Battle Forces maybe we shall see a decline in the performance of the Battle Forces?

Let’s have a look if it’s worth taking Luke in Echo Base since this is a common question asked since most people think that the command cards giving him a refresh ability make it worthwhile. Well with him taken in 50 games for Echo base and 40 games in normal Rebel armies he has a solid 42% win rate in both. Bottom line he is bad no matter what compared to his Jedi knight version with a whopping 45%…oh wait not a much better win rate.

So what commander should you be taking? Rebel Officer in Echo Base has an increase of 22% but does have about 10% of the games played. If we take Leia in Echo Base we have a 50% but Han gives us 52% win rate. The biggest hero of the rebellion is Chewie with 61% win rate in Echo base.
If we look at these characters in just any normal Rebel army Leia has a 40%, Han and Chewie have 36%.

If we look at the corps units and support that you can take in Echo Base you have an increase of 12% for taking veterans and turrets while the T-47 has 9% increase.

Bright Tree Village

Bright Tree village is one of the newer Battle Forces and is unique in the sense you can’t take many of the units outside of the Battle Force. So, it is hard to compare the win rates between the units taken in the Battle Force and those taken normally. What we can look at though is over the 82 games of data the faction as a whole has a 51% win rate which is nice and balanced right? Well, mostly right (probably) but the rebel faction itself only has a 46% win rate.

Separatists

Invasion Force

This is the first Battle Force where some units being taken in the Battle Force are worse than if you take them in the normal Separatists army. Magnaguards sit with a 44% win rate while normally they have a 49% win rate. Does this mean Invasion Force is bad?

No, the overall win rate for this Battle Force is still 50% which is still higher than the normal faction win rate of 48%. Now the Battle Force only has a total of 46 games recorded compared to 605 so it is worth taking that into consideration that maybe with more data this would be lower than the faction itself.
Overall, Invasion Force is the worst of all the Battle Forces to date but still sits higher than all of the pure faction win rates.

Experimental Droids

In the current Data set we again don’t have much data available for this Battle Force to be able to discuss them in depth but just like the Wookies it will be worth keeping an eye on the Battle Force to see how it performs at the next couple of up coming events to see if it follows the current tradition of being strong on release.

Shadow Collective

The shadow collective are the odd ones out here in the data set since it is not a proper faction, but rather a pure Battle Force. If we compare our win rates as a pure faction vs the other pure factions, Shadow Collective are the top dog with 52% win rate. Compared to other Battle Forces, however, it sits right in the middle.

What does this all mean?

Do I think the game is balanced?? Before I looked at this data I would have said yes without a doubt, everyone can put any unit on the table and has a chance of doing well if you have the experience. Do some units give you a stronger chance? Yes of course but there are definitely some units that were not on my radar before looking at this data.

I love the fact that some units that have low win rates in the pure faction and have a high win rate in the Battle Forces. It’s a very clever design space for bringing units that are normally seen back to the table without having to change the unit’s profile.

The most important thing to take from this article is that Battle Forces are here to stay, and AMG is going to continue releasing them. I have no issue with this I love how thematic they are but the fact remains: they stated some of them are just going to be following a theme and don’t expect them to be competitive….but every single Battle Force has over a 50% win rate and have a higher win rate then the pure faction it is related to.

Naturally, multiple factors such as player experience level with certain units as well as a variety of other items play a part in which lists are successful repeatedly. If you want help in optimizing your lists, then consider looking at this data and drop them low percentage win rate units and start using and spamming the high rate units to help.

Faction Stat Dump

Separatist

Republic

Rebel

Imperial