I have no doubt that this question is one that will be interesting to all civilization fans, and in this post, I will do my best to answer it with data and statistics! Part of the joy of the game is playing different civilizations with their diverse bonuses, and the strategies that those bonuses encourage. However, I want to make very clear that everything in this post is only applicable to civ V multiplayer. The reason for this is that the civilization AI is fairly simple, and wont adapt its decisions to take in to account the bonuses of the civilization you as a human are playing. In multiplayer, it’s quite the opposite. If you start next to the Huns you are going to be very wary of defense right from the first turn of the game. Likewise, if you start next to Korea, you will be aware that you can’t compete in a science race and so you will adjust your strategy accordingly. Therefore bear in mind that as we are using data from multiplayer games (see below), any conclusions probably wont apply to the single player game.

The dataset I am using to try and get at this question is a collection of information from 180 civilization V multiplayer games played by FilthyRobot (if you’re new to the site, you can catch up here).

The Civilization V multiplayer tier list

In order to examine whether “strong” civilizations (those with impactful abilities/units/buildings) are better than “weak” ones, we need some way of evaluating the strength of civilizations that is consistent and as fair as possible. Fortunately, FilthyRobot has already done that work for us, and has classified each civilization into six tiers, based on how strong their bonuses are overall. You can find the complete tier list here.

The brief definition (as written by FilthyRobot, not me) of each tier is as follows:

God Tier Bonuses are consistent and game changingly strong Strong Bonuses are consistent and strong or situational and game-changingly strong Decent Bonuses are consistent and mediocre or situational and strong Weak Bonuses are consistent but weak or situational and mediocre Awful Bonuses are consistently inconsequential or situational and weak Joke Bonuses are detrimental to the civilization

The nice thing about using this list is that it’s written by the same player from whom we collected game data! So by definition the “strong” civilizations will be those FilthyRobot finds to be strong in his hands.

While there may be small disagreements between players as to the position of every civilization on the list, it is fairly widely accepted to be a good and accurate list. For the purposes of this post, I wont be discussing the merits of the list itself, as it was compiled by someone with a great deal more experience!

So without further ado, let’s dive in and see how FiltyRobot performed with Civilizations from each tier.

The hidden danger of playing a strong civilization



Before we divide the civilizations into tiers, let’s take a look at FilthyRobot’s success rate in general. Across all the games in the dataset, the win percentage is 54%. So for the 180 games I looked at, FilthyRobot won just over 1 out of every 2 games. Aside from the fact this is clearly impressive for a set of 6 player games, it’s also nice for us to approach statistics, as the number of games providing data for wins and losses is roughly equal.

When collecting the information on each game I took note of the games in which FilthyRobot is “teamed” (when more than one player attack at the same time, making it very hard to defend). Teaming requires that one player somehow keep up with the production of two, and as such is seen as unfair practice in many circumstances. I also decided that it was unfair to count games in which he was teamed as a loss, because there is little a player can do to overcome the situation. Essentially, teaming removes the possibility of winning the game for the targeted player, and thus losing doesn’t reflect on that player’s performance.

When we remove games in which teaming occurred from the dataset, the win percentage increases to 59%. I was then curious to see if there was anything in common between the games in which FilthyRobot was teamed by opponents compared to other losses. Specifically, I wanted to see if he was more likely to be teamed when playing as a strong civilization. The reason for this is that opponents are more likely to panic if FilthyRobot (who is a well known highly skilled player) is playing a strong civilization, and feel like a combined effort is necessary to stop him. Similarly if he is playing a weak civilization he might be more likely to fly under the radar.

The graphs below show the number of games in which FilthyRobot was teamed playing a civilization from each of the 6 tiers, as well as the proportion of games played with each tier in which he was teamed:

The numbers at the base of each bar represent the number of games played with each tier. The value for the absent bars (Tier 5 and 6) is 0.

As you can see above, teaming only occurred when FilthyRobot played with Civilizations from the first 4 tiers. In addition, apart from the unexpectedly high proportion of teamings in tier 4 games (note that the sample size for this group is low, so this high value might be due to chance), the data suggests that this proportion is also relatively high for the games played with Tier 1 civilizations, where we would expect the highest based on our prior reasoning. It is also interesting that FilthyRobot was never teamed when playing as a civilization recognized to be weak.

While the data isn’t completely conclusive, it hints that playing a strong civilization might carry a hidden danger, that opponents are more likely to conspire against the player. This is likely exacerbated if the player is well known and highly regarded in the community, as is the case here.

So can playing a strong civilization help?

With the complication of teaming in mind, I decided to remove the games in which teaming occurred from the data. With those games gone, we would expect that the strong civilizations have better win percentages, right? …Right? I mean, Poland Stronk and all that, right?

Well, take a look:

Numbers at the base of each bar represents the number of games in each set. The dashed horizontal line represents the overall win percentage across all games.

The data are quite unexpected, and show very little difference between the different tiers. The only exception is the 100% win rate with the “Joke tier” civs, which is probably attributable to chance given the small number of games.

While it might be tempting to draw conclusions based on the percentage difference between tiers, it’s worth noting that none of these differences are statistically significant. That is to say in random datasets of this size, we would expect to see similar differences approximately 70% of the time.

To further check if the tier of the civilization played had any outcome on the probabilty of winning the game, I fit a logistic regression model testing whether the tier of FilthyRobot’s civ, or the tier of the eventual winner’s civ were good predictors of winning. Furthermore, I also tested whether other independent information (such as information about the starting terrain) were able to explain the observed pattern of wins/losses.

Both the tier of FilthyRobot’s civ, or the tier of winning civ (regardless of which player won the game) were stunningly poor predictors of whether games were won or lost. In contrast, certain aspects of the starting terrain were excellent predictors of whether the game was won (which I am excited to say will be the topic of the next post!).

From this, I have to conclude that the strength of the bonuses of the civilization did very little to increase the chances of FilthyRobot winning the game. I would like to reiterate that this likely doesn’t apply to single player at all, because the AI will be vulnerable to certain bonuses much more so than humans (anyone who has waged war with camel archers knows this). This conclusion might also not apply to multiplayer players of different abilities, or perhaps this only applies when the opponents are experienced players.

To sum up the take-home message of this post, I will leave you with a nugget of information so illustrative that it’s almost cruel. FilthyRobot has a 100% win record (over 3 or more games) with just two civilizations. The first is Persia, a tier 1 civ that is widely recognized to have very strong bonuses, and has been adopted by FilthyRobot as one of his favourites in the game. The second…. is the Iroquois. The much-maligned Iroquois are one of the unlucky members of tier 6. Famous for their disappointing bonuses, the Iroquois have drawn the ire of many a Civ V player.

If that isn’t a fun statistic to suggest that civilization bonuses have little impact, then I don’t know what is!