ENGCycle 30 has ended, the last cycle for 2015 / 3301.
No raw data for weeks 29 and 30 yet, not sure where Zac gets off taking holidays at this time of year, its very inconvenient
I'm running out of charts to show since there is no new information (yet), all charts are based on weeks 6-28, other than the scores and number of systems, which uses the in game totals.
Fortification
Effective Fortification by %
The chart on the left shows the weekly effective fortification %, and the one on the right shows the average per week.
Not all the powers fortify the same way, some deliver TO their HQ, some deliver FROM their HQ.
Those that deliver FROM their HQ (or outbound fortification) are able to do the "drop 1T trick", which updates the total they see, and if it is 100% fortified they can deliver these packages to a different system.
Powers that deliver TO their HQ (or inbound fortification) can either drop all their packages at the HQ or jettison them into space, there is no trick to not waste fortification.
Mahon, Delaine, Torval and Antal have inbound fortification, and ALD, Hudson, Winters, Aisling, SIrius and Patreus do outbound fortification.
Patreus did the most effective fortifying out of everyone in cycle 26
Cycle 18 marks the decline of both ALD and Hudsons effective fortification rates. I'm not sure what changed after that week.
ALD is was consistantly worst, with Aisling and Hudson usually 2nd and 3rd worst.
This is somewhat expected because these 3 powers have the largest player base, and its more difficult to wrangle more players.
Antal had a period where his % went bad, this was around their controlled Turmoil phase.
Sirius has been very inconsistent over the last 2 months.
Archon Delaine completed the year with the best average effective fortifying (which he needed when you look at the latter charts).
There wasn't much between the top 4 positions, and only ALD wasted more than 50% of their fortifications each week.
ALD takes out the most total fortification for the year, with a comfortable margin over Aisling in 2nd and Hudson in 3rd.
These 3 powers have a large lead over everyone else.
ALD and Aisling combined did more fortification than the 7 lowest (everyone excluding Hudson)
$th to 10th (Mahon to Delaine) has a steady decline, with Mahon doing nearly 3 times the total fortification of Delaine.
Only Aisling and ALD swap position from the Total to Effective charts, with Aisling doing the most effective total fortifications for the year.
The gaps between the Powers tightens up, with the 3 large powers having a much lower effective % than the smaller powers.
ALD does more than 8 times the total fortifications that Delaine did for the year, but only 4 times the effective fortification.
I've included Mahon with the "others", because it still doesn't make all 4 of them combined do more fortification than the 2 Federation Powers.
But I've put the Alliance in the last chart, to see how effective the "average" of "all" the alliance powers were.
Undermining
The left chart shows the weekly effective undermined rate, and the right chart shows the average weekly undermined.
Aisling, ALD, Torval and Antal see-saw up and down, as the go from being completely unopposed, to being targeted by organised powers.
The other 6 powers are generally hit at the same rate each week, with Sirius seeing an uptick in the past few weeks.
Sirius was undermined at the worst rate from his attackers point of view, best rate form his point of view, with only 22% being effective.
ALD had the least amount of undermining wasted on her, at 54% effective.
The 4 Imperial powers were the 4 most effectively undermined for the year.
Antal received the least total undermining for the year, with Aisling, Patreus and Torval also receiving fairly small amounts of undermining.
ALD and Sirius had a medium amount of undermining, with Hudson, Delaine, Winters and Mahon getting undermined a large amount each week.
Mahon was the most undermined Power in the year, with no Power Publicly targeting them, the closest I can remember was the Kumo Crew nearly going Nuclear on Mahon, but that didn't eventuate.
The power of targeting your undermining is shown on the right hand chart, with ALD moving from 6th most undermined, to 4th most effectively undermined, pushing past Sirius and Delaine.
Delaine received nearly 80% more total undermining than ALD, but less effective undermining.
Sirius moved from 5th most undermined to 7th most effectively undermined, due to the large amount of mindless grinding they receive each week.
The Federation received more undermining that the Empire (2 Powers vs 4), and all the Alliance Powers (all one of them) nearly receive as much total undermining as all 4 Imperial Powers combined.
The effective pie chart to the right shows the Empire and Federation receiving a much more similar amount, with the "other" group of Sirius and Antal being undermined the least.
The bottom chart shows the total undermining per faction member, which divides the Imperial total by 4, the federation and other total by 2 and the alliance and pirate totals by 1.
Fortification and Undermining Ratio
Above is the data for the charts underneath
The two charts above show the same thing, just the inverse, so you can see whats happening at the small end of the charts, where the numbers are less than one.
The left chart divides Undermining by Fortification, the right chart divides Fortification by Undermining.
The blue bar shows Archon Delaine was undermined nearly 10 times the total amount that he fortified through the year.
The red bar shows a drastic improvement to "only" 4 times when looking at effective undermining and fortification (9.9 to 3.9 to be exact).
Winters and Mahon were both able to get away with the next best ratios of fortification to undermining.
Delaine and Winters went the whole of last year without losing a system.
Mahon lost the least number of systems by any Power who lost one (everyone but Delaine and Winters).
Ordinarily the Powers who were undermined more than they fortified would be the ones who are in Turmoil more, but a well maintained CC economy, and a smart fortification plan that the players actually follow are far more important.
ALD, Antal and Aisling all fortified more than they were undermined for the year.
The right hand chart shows how drastic it is for Aisling, even though she is hardly undermined, her poor starting CC balance means fortification is needed all the time.
Score
ALD dominated the score in the first half of Power Play, with Mahon taking over in the second half, and still comfortably in the lead.
ALD has a slightly better average score than Mahon, and at the other end, Delaine has a slightly better average score than Antal.
Note that the above chart has 10th at the top and 1st at the bottom.
ALD had a better average rank (just like the score) than Mahon, but ALDs most common ranking was 2nd, while Mahon was most commonly at 1st position.
5 Powers made it to the 1st rank, although Winters started PP there and was unable to get back there.
Mahon spent the most time in the 1st position, with 12 cycles.
5th was the worst position that ALD got to, while Mahon was 7th at one stage.
Torval had the largest range of rankings, 2nd to 10th.
These charts look at the first 15 weeks and the second 16 weeks of Power Play.
ALD clearly did the best in the first half of PP, with Aisling being second.
Mahon was only the 5th highest scored in the first half.
Mahon has done the best in the second 16 weeks of PP, followed by Hudson.
The chart to the right compares the different in the scores for the two halves, Mahon, Antal and Hudson are doing much better.
Delaine is doing slightly better, Sirius is about equal and Winters (who started in 1st place) is doing slightly worse.
Torval, ALD, Aisling and Patreus (the 4 Imperial Powers) are all doing noticeably worse in the scores in the last 16 weeks, compared to where they were in the first 15 weeks, where an ALD, Torval, Aisling 1st, 2nd, 3rd was looking like an eventuality.
Commentary
Its hard to sum up all the things thats happened in 30 weeks.
I was pledged to ALD for the first 4 weeks, and Delaine for the remaining 26 weeks, so most of the events that I know of are from that perspective.
I don't really know what went on with Sirius over the past 30 week, I'm sure they were all doing interesting things, but I'm clueless to what they might have been.
One of my personal favorite things from Power Play was the House of Cards initiative form many many weeks ago.
If you know what that was, you were involved, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I've said too much already
Although I speculate wildly here, I try to make it balanced, I wont bother for the end of the year, mainly because I have so little to say otherwise
So let the high octane speculation begin
Mahon 1st
Mahon, and let me be clear, when I refer to the Powers name, that's just the figure head, I'm talking about the players, had what can only be described as a perfect second half of Power Play.
You can look at the charts and argue if ALD or Mahon was the best over all, Mahon is smashing everyone right now, and they have no right to do that, which makes it all the more impressive.
There is absolutely no reason Mahon should win any profitable expansion. Ever.
They have to deliver material, Hudson and ALD (let alone anyone else with ideas of being ranked 1st, hint hint Aisling) can and should stop every single expansion attempt.
Not only should Mahon not win any expansions, they are winning with a ridiculously low amount of effort.
15000 merits seems to be enough to win, its hard to believe this isn't always stopped, especially when he is undermined by more than 700000 merits every week.
Mahon started PP in 5th position, and dropped down to 7th in cycle 3.
In cycle 10 he got to 2nd, and in cycle 16 he reached 1st, and in the 16 weeks from cycle 16 to 31, he has been 1st for 12 cycles, and with Hudson and ALD bleeding systems recently (doesn't matter if some were unprofitable) he will be number 1 for a long time to come.
Unless Mahon starts expanding into the Pegasi Sector, I don't envision any Power openly attacking him, because if they haven't so far, and hes had the big target of 1st on his back for months, why would they bother now?
ALD 2nd
As I said above, you can argue if Mahon or ALD have done the best in the 30 weeks of PP, but they are certainly top 2.
ALD started PP in 3rd position with the largest, or second largest player base.
Its hard to quantify how many more players ALD had over Hudson and Winters, but it was common for me to encounter 2 or 3 wings of ALD players (I was with ALD) when I would go undermining, and we normally had to go into private groups so we weren't competing for the ships to interdict.
Expansions of Winters and Hudsons were usually shut down, unless they were on the other side of the bubble from the Empire.
I would spend a lot of time trying to get the bad systems (which were the ones with a profit of less than 120 I think) fro our prep list, while scooping up all the good systems next to Torval, Aisling and Patreus, because ALD could expand to 10 systems per week, and no-one else could.
This of course wreaked ALDs overheads, and in week 4 ALD was the first Power to hit Turmoil, not because of any enemy actions.
I left in week 4, not because of the Turmoil, but in week five, 10 more systems were expanded to, and the overheads went from 2000 to 5000, pushing 100% of ALDs systems into Tumoil, and putting ALD in 10th place.
ALDs overhead costs were changed by FDev and ALD was returned to 1st position.
ALD was 1st in cycle 14, 3rd in cycle 1 and 2nd for only 5 of the weeks between, the rest of the time she was 1st.
The wheels seem to have fallen off from cycle 15, with her ranking hitting 1st only twice more, and fluctuating between 5th and 2nd for most of it.
ALD still has a very large player base, but most of it seems undirectable. The number of players that can actually coherently work towards a common goal seems to be greatly diminished.
Where once there was one large player group, Lavignys Legion, now there are multiple group all pushing in different directions.
The days of being able to stop all Federation expansions, while undermining 100% of Archon Delaines systems are long over.
ALD is spread too thin, with too many current enemies to be able to take back the 1st position, which would require them to openly attack Mahon for months.
Unless there is a collective will to get back into 1st position, ALD will continue to be ranked 2nd to 5th, maybe 3rd to 5th, while having the player numbers to be ranked number 1.
Hudson 3rd
The start of PP was a dark time for the federation.
All the cool kids joined the Empire.
Galnet ran story after story about the Empire and the Emperors poor health.
There were community goals to enslave more people or free them, on behalf of Patreus and Aisling.
I think the word Federation was censored from Galnet.
There was one reason to get Imperial rank, the Imperial Clipper, there wasn't any reason to get Federation rank, unless you wanted the troop transport ship, the Federal Dropship, except there were no troops to transport (and still aren't)
The Empire had its fair share of Pythons and Anacondas, anyone who had made the trip down had been playing for months. At lease you had to understand what a fuel scoop was for, and there were no fuel rats to rescue you.
Most of the Hudson players (certainly not all) seemed to be new, and pledged to the guy whos system they started in.
Hudson started in 2nd position, and made it to 1st place in the second week, but this was more due to Winters getting poleaxed by the empire.
He rose to 1st in cycle 6 and 7, but things went very bad for cycle 8 to 14, with him being ranked 4th to 6th.
Cycle 15 was a turning point, as it was for ALD, and Hudson has been ranked 1st to 4th every week since, except this week, where he is 5th.
In the past few weeks Hudson has faltered in the holiday season, and lost 6 systems putting him on only one more than ALD.
Hudson is still in Turmoil and could lose even more if things are not corrected.
Meanwhile, Mahon gets stronger and stronger, while Hudson and ALD bleed each others strength.
Its possible Winters will soon have more systems than Hudson, and take the 2nd to 3rd ranking from him, but Hudson should still be able to stay in the top 4 (once he leaves Turmoil) for the foreseeable future.
Winters 4th
Winters is the Pound for Pound champion of PP.
Well maybe Antal is the Pound for Pound champ, but if we exclude the straw-weight category, Winters wins.
Things were less than promising for Winters at the start.
Being in 1st position with far too many systems for the players who pledged to a power that got the perk of back ground simulation bonus, Winters looked like she was created to make the Empire look good.
She would tumble down the ranks, losing system after system, as the Empire conquered the galaxy.
Winters steadily dropped from 1st to 7th from cycle 1 to cycle 11, but somehow never lost a system.
From that point on, Winters has been between 5th and 2nd, except for cycle 22, where she fell to 6th.
And still no systems were lost.
The first few months of PP obviously made all non believers leave with a broken spirit, and all that remained was a core of professional PP followers.
This has allowed Winters to rise to 67 systems, which is very close to ALD and Hudsons total, making it possible for Winters to be legitimately ranked 2nd, not just when ALD and Hudson hit Turmoil.
There still seem to be profitable systems in the Alliance / Federation zone of the inhabited sphere, so mid term growth is possible, making it possible to overtake ALD, and stay in front of Aisling.
Last week I said it would be impossible for Winters to win their expansion into ALD territory, and expansion than Hudson has failed twice while having the Combat expansion method.
I was wrong, and what happened sums up the difference between Winters, and the much larger Hudson and ALD.
Ailsing 5th
Aisling had a strong start to PP, with perhaps the largest player base, who knew everyone would pledge to the blue haired hottie?
With Galnet articles and community goals before PP, and all the benefits of being in the cool club of the Empire, while also being against Imperial Slavery, there was a lot of work put into getting her a good number of players.
They even released her picture first.
Aisling started in 6th position, and had an epic battle with ALD for the preparation of Cartoi.
This broke the wills of many of the players in both Powers to have another confrontation, so negotiations were opened, and prep targets were swapped around, to the annoyance of player from both sides.
Nearly all of the profitable systems between ALD and Aisling were expanded to by ALD, and although the Federation seemed a likely ally, because of the anti-slaver stance, and having no neighboring systems, Aisling decided to expand near Winters.
This along with pledges of "peace" between Aisling and the Federation that have failed, have made what looked like 2 likely allies, into enemies.
Somewhere along the way, bad system after bad system were expanded to.
Aisling is positioned in the poorest part of Imperial Space, which is to say, the 3rd worst part of space after Antal and Delaine, and being so far from enemies, no-one opposed Aisling expansions.
This allowed all expansions to win (like most Imperial expansions) which allowed the poorer income systems to seep in.
Its very difficult to see what Aisling can do, shedding most of her system is probably the best thing, but this will put her in 10th position for a long time.
The worst thing about "starting again", is there is no guarantee bad systems wont be expanded to the second time.
Aisling has what still might be the largest player base, certainly top 3, but she hasn't been ranked in the top 2 since cycle 15 (where she was 1st) and has only been in the top 3 once in that same period.
Fixing her economy might be beyond her players ability, so the best way to move up, is to attack those above her, rather than improve her own score, she needs to hurt the scores of Winters, Hudson, Mahon and ALD.
Torval 6th
I've put Torval at 6th because she climbed all the way up to 2nd, something the other 4 powers haven't been able to do.
Torval had a very promising start to PP.
With a small player base, but extremely well organised with most players coming from the EIC, moving goods around was her second nature.
At the start of PP Winters was 1st, then Hudson, ALD and Torval in 4th.
In cycle 4, ALD was 1st, Torval 2nd, Winters and Hudson were tied on 3rd, and rare goods systems were being snapped up by Torval in federation space.
Aisling was next in 5th position, and looked likely to get to 3rd very soon.
Then the EIC left Torval and PP in general.
These were hard times for Torval supporters. With a massive amount of new territory to fortify, with many less players, and Hudson "trying out the collapse mechanism" on her, things were frantic.
Torval went from 2nd in cycle 5, to 10th in cycle 14. She went from 48 systems to 40.
She recovered from cycle 14, and has generally been between 8th and 6th, only dropping to 9th this week.
Torval even has more systems than she had when ranked 2nd.
With Sirius bleeding systems recently, Torval is securely in 6th position, and should remain around there for the foreseeable future.
Sirius 7th
Sirius and Mahon have much in common, they have a similar "Look over there, its a distraction" policy on expanding to every profitable system in the galaxy.
The only difference is, someone keeps Sirius in check, while Mahon is allowed to get away with it (maybe its Mahon?)
Every now and then, Sirius gets too big, and they get whacked with turmoil.
Then they get left alone, except one system that gets grinded on.
In cycle 27, Heverduduna got 227160 merits of undermining, Aisling, Torval and Antal were undermined for a combined 278730 merits.
Heverduduna nearly gets undermined as much as 3 Powers combined!
Early in PP Sirius and ALD signed a treaty setting up "embassy", which were systems near each other, so Sirius could easily get the bounty hunting bonus, and ALD could easily get the ship discount bonus.
They started in 8th position, and remained there until cycle 6, where they began their rise up to 3rd, in cycle 9.
Sirius was 3rd again in cycle 11, but since then, they have bounced between 4th and 7th, falling to 8th this week.
Sirius got to 59 systems, then was knocked down to 52.
Then he got back up to 60 systems, and is currently on 54, and may lose more.
Looks like 59-60 systems is large enough to get someones attention.
At the moment Mahon, Antal and Winters are attempting to take the areas that Sirius used to hold, if these are lost, its difficult to see where future profitable systems will come from, and position in 7th or 8th may be realistic for the new year.
Patreus 8th
Patreus should have had a good start to PP.
There were Galnet articles, and community goals, I followed them around looking for PvP while supporting the baddest slaver in the galaxy.
He was the Imperial warmonger, anyone wanting combat was his target audience.
His territory was the shield for the empire, Two Federation Power right above, Three Independant Powers to the side.
Then they gave him a bonus of reduced ammo costs.
While ALD got a massive bounty hunting bonus.
The nail in the coffin for me was his picture.
There is a limit of words that the filter here will allow. He's portly, with a funny suit, and that hair.
I can't blame everyone for not pledging to him, I didn't.
So poor Patreus was the aggressive part of the Empire, without any players.
There were red undermined systems all over his space in the first few weeks.
Patreus started on equal 6th position with Aisling.
He was last in 6th position in cycle 15 (there's that week again), except for this week, where he makes a return to where he started PP, 6th.
Patreus had a hard time expanding early on, and the expansion attempt by Delaine in to Cuchua in cycle 5 kicked ALD and Aisling into action, and the 3 of them launched their Pirate War on Archon Delaine.
The Pirate war had been either a massive waste of ALD and Aisling resources, or disastrous for both of them, depending on how you look at it.
It hasn't necessarily been bad for Patreus though.
He was already being attacked by Delaine, and may have continued to be attacked by him, although the majority of the Kumo Crew players were anti-federation, and likely to attack Hudson over Patreus.
In cycle 17 Patreus made it to 51 control systems, but has hit the undermining/overhead wall, and has found it difficult to expand further.
Cycle 22 saw his most amount of systems, 53, but this has declined back down to 50.
This week is the first time in a while for him to expand, but he faces the same problems, the overhead costs of additional systems require an increase in fortification levels, which require more players.
Until undermining on Patrues lessens, or his fortification increases, any new systems will be very difficult to win, and Patreus will probably be ranked 8th to 10th in the new year, but its possible he may move past Sirius.
Antal 9th
I've placed Antal at number 9, although he had the worst average score and ranking, he did manage to get to 7th position twice.
The Utopians had a very humble beginning.
5% was their starting score, and in week 9 Antals score had risen to 35%, moving past Delaine to 9th position.
In cycle 13 Antal had risen to 7th position, but from cycle 14 to 26 he was back to 9th or 10th.
Antal was able to go through a controlled turmoil., that actually shed loss making systems.
He did have 46 systems, went back down to 39, and is now back up to 44.
After the controlled turmoil, Antal prepared systems all over the place, including one that annoyed Patreus, and one that annoyed Hudson.
Although he normally isn't undermined much , that week he was pushed into Turmoil, and all expansions failed.
Since then less aggressive preparation targets have been selected, except towards ex-Sirius systems, with 2 already expanded into, and another one on the way.
With his number of systems getting close to Patreus, Antal should be more in the 8th - 9th range, than the 9th - 10th range in the new year, unless he annoys someone else.
Delaine 10th
Archon Delaine started PP in 9th position, and has managed to finish the year on 10th.
In cycle 4 the profitable system of Cuchua was prepared, which was attempted to be expanded into in cycle 5.
Also in cycle 5, the CryptoScrambler became available, which caused a mass exodus of the Archon Delaine player base, and official support from the CODE player group was dropped, although some CODE players remained pledged.
ALD, Aisling and Patreus launched the Pegasi Pirate War to defend the Empire, or test the collapse mechanics on the smallest player base, depending on who you listened to.
This was the time I pledged to Delaine. I was a poor rating 4 assassin / bounty hunter with an Imperial Courier (well I had a Python, so was hardly poor).
So I got to fortifying, along with the other 4 players left pledged to Delaine, and made more cr than I know what to do with.
The Empire wondered how long we could fortify for. One more week and we would be bankrupt.
Nope.
Smuggling and 50 million cr per week for rating 5.
We were making 100s of millions per week each, and doing 5000-10000T of fortification each.
Expansion was hard, especially when it was 1 merit per kill, not the current 10 merits per kill, but we persevered.
There were weeks where our expansions had more opposition than all the other 9 powers expansions combined.
Winning Badjurans and Hip 106072 were epic feats of subterfuge, with no-one knowing until after the cycle ended if everything came together.
We had 18 systems in cycle 6, the pressure of the war has limited us to only expand to 23 more systems in that time.
In the same period, Aisling managed to expand more than us, to 24 new systems compared to our 23.
ALD has only managed 15 and Patreus 19 new systems.
The Kumo crew received total undermining of 17,553,637, while Aisling, Patreus and ALD had a combined total of 17,053,624 for the year.
Archon Delaine also forgot to try out the Turmoil mechanic all year, leaves us something new to look forward to in the new year.
