hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to dive into the question of what
is the best water civ or at least what are the top five now one way to approach the question
would be a subjective list based on Theory crafting or we could look at the popularity
of Civ picks do basically crowdsource and answer if we trust a popularity it
seems the top five are Vikings Italians Portuguese dravidians and then byzantines
which seems like a pretty strong list so there you have it thanks for watching
but hang on now I'm curious how that perception actually holds up in practice and whether those
are the civs that win the most in the real world this is a little tricky to answer with stats given
water maps are so unpopular that it's hard to get enough data to feel confident so we're going to
be using over a year of data from aoepulse.com which includes any and all ranked water games
played between August 2021 until the most recent data available which seems to be sometime last
September now having said that the question of what is the best water civ also kind of depends
on what we consider a water map naps can range anywhere from having small lakes to being made
up mostly of water and even some that have terrain which is simultaneously water and land best water
civs is a murky label and we may not all agree on which of those Maps should count to address
that I've decided to do separate lists for the three main categories of water Maps the first
type is the full water maps with the main thread being that you have to cross water to reach your
opponent's starting Town Center the next type is the swamp map which play out quite differently and
can get messy with demo rafts attacking wood lines and galleys or fire ships fighting directly with
land units the third type is what's typically called the hybrid Maps where town centers are
connected by land but with the added option to fish boom or contest Lakes so those are the
three categories and given these sample sizes due to the unpopularity of water Maps I would
take this all with an ocean of salt and treat this as a conversation Point rather than a definitive
list unlike what I usually do we're also going to be including games from all ELO ratings here
but also because players above a thousand ELO as a group are roughly three times more likely to ban
water Maps like islands for example than players under a thousand ELO so I don't mind the results
reflecting here the greater interest from casual players with all that out of the way let's start
off the list with the full water maps including Islands archipelago Northern Isles and migration
at number six we have the Vikings with a 54 win rate they missed out on the top five but I wanted
to include them as they're the most popular pick chosen about 15 of the time considering how many
bonuses they have it's admittedly surprising to not see them higher you have cheaper docks more
ships a solid land economy with free wheelbarrow and hand carts and the unique Longboat it's a lot
of things that should be helping here even just to dwell on the Longboat for a moment they train
faster than galleys hold it much better against fire ships are better at destroying docks move
faster and stack better so you can get more of them into a battle at once just saying Vikings
have the Longboat encapsulates a lot of advantages in that one unit alone the main issue here for
Vikings not performing better might be the lack of fire shift though which means if you want to
contest water and raid your opponent's fishing ships you're pretty much forced into the galley
line at least limiting your early options fire galleys are designed to counter galleys without
micro and again if we're having casual players in mind the galley micro hero is probably not
tip top making fire ships even stronger another thing I've seen players try to do is go full
Longboat against War Galley or Galleon and players may be surprised to learn that's
not actually a great matchup head-to-head with equal resources and certainly not a good idea
if the longboats are behind in numbers there may be an element of overconfidence in taking
fights based on the Vikings reputation that is actually holding them back a bit in practice
next up at number 5 is the Malay what's most interesting here is they perform worse and are
picked less often as you go up in Elo though as I said this data is weighted toward casual players
where it's really the 600 to 1000 ELO crowd that seem to do best with them that might be because
those games tend to be a bit more passive and have more emphasis on the late game where Malay
really shine as that's when their advantages kick in of course they are still a naval civ with the
harbor giving a lot of map presence in the late game cheaper longer lasting fist traps giving
excellent long-term wood value and extra line of sight on dogs they're obviously a solid water civ
especially if you're okay handling their faster Advanced times messing a bit with your early
build next up at number 4 we have The Darlings of the water map world the Italians you have Doc
and University techs being cheaper fishing ships having a 15 discount they have cheaper advancing
discounted Cannon galleons and the condottiero being a great landing unit in Imperial age while
the strength of their water bonuses is pretty self-explanatory the condottiero is also a nice
feature here where a unit like the champion has four separate upgrades to get caught up and even
the r Blaster has two the condottiero comes out of the box ready to go which makes for a really fast
Imperial transition from water to land Italians are the second most popular pick and arguably
look the best on paper but in practice just aren't performing quite well enough for top three online
next at number 3 we have the byzantines with just over a 57 win rate ever since fire galleys entered
the scene byzantines have been a pretty serious Contender on water with extra attack speed and
range on that popular unit line they don't have the huge number of obvious water bonuses that
Italians do but more HP on your buildings means stronger docks and their discount in Imperial
age is another handy bonus that can fly under the radar even just getting to Imperial a bit quicker
and having Fast Fire ships for a short time against Castle age units can really turn things in
your favor altogether it makes them a really solid choice on water and they're a reasonably popular
pick as well as if fun fact they're actually number one if you filter to 1200 ELO and up again
with some pretty weak sample sizes that I wouldn't take as gospel moving on to number two out of
nowhere we have the Sicilians with 58 percent admittedly this is a smaller sample size of
around 2200 games and it's also a little peculiar on the face of it they're only direct water bonus
is the transport ship having more line of sight and a lower cost as the sicilian's bonus damage
resistance specifically excludes water units just to be sure I double checked and couldn't
find a single example of a slip up where a water unit was taking less bonus damage than it should
have now it is true their transport ships used to have higher armor and you might think their
old win rate from using those to soak up damage is influencing their good results here but all of
this data is coming from after that change so that can't explain what's happening they're also doing
better on Islands than on migration so this isn't just an early cheaper transport ship accounting
for this outside of just a small sample size one thing that does occur to me is that first crusade
in Faster built castles could be an unexpectedly good bonus on water Maps if you're focusing hard
on water you probably aren't preparing any land units and maybe don't even have a Barracks so if
someone sneakily lands on your Island the ability to quickly put up a castle and create an army of
Sergeants could help stabilize or it could even be sent offensively to the enemy Island in an
emergency it would be easier to throw down a quick castle and get First Crusade than it would be to
make a Barracks then archery range or stables and create those units from scratch though it's
hard to say that's really what's going on here the farm upgrades giving double the effect might also
be leading to a lot of wood savings that end up winning games now and then of course their Naval
Tech Tree is also quite good so it's not that they don't deserve a mention here it's just surprising
they're number two they've also been top five in High ELO rating games as well so Sicilians
are definitely looking like a legit water civ and finally at number one we have the dravidians with
an over 58 win rate this is actually nice to see as they've been doing pretty terribly on land Maps
since they were released they received 200 extra wood after advancing fishing ships carry 15 more
food docks provide population space and they of course have their unique warship which crushes
especially the war Galley on paper they look very strong on water and it's nice to see the results
pan out that way despite their great performance though their play rate is actually lower than
byzantines and about half that of Italians and a third that of Vikings I don't know if they'll
keep up having this level of success especially as their reputation becomes more widely known and
they're picked more often but I do think they're the real deal on water maps in fact looking at the
civilizations with over a 50 win rate it really is most of the ones you'd expect making the list
feel pretty reasonable if I gave a subjective list it would probably be similar with maybe Sicilians
down a bit and Italians and Vikings a bit higher though it's still interesting to see the results
and I definitely find it more thought-provoking than the play rate list so that's the water maps
in the purest traditional sense but now let's move on to the swamp Maps these are ones that
have a significant amount of area traversable by water and land units leading to a lot of messy
interactions between Naval and land especially with demo ships meeting this definition and have
been in the ranked pool we have bog Islands golden swamp and water Nomad on those Maps together the
top five are dravidians again making an appearance succeeded by berber's Italians or jars and at
number one this time Vikings notice byzantines and Sicilians have dropped off the list as fire ships
and whatever was helping Sicilians do so well on water Maps doesn't seem to translate the same way
on Swamp Maps Malay are also much worse here which is interesting since I would think Harbors could
be a big asset on maps like this giving you a defensive building for 150 wood it's notable
that dravidians Italians and Vikings again show up with Vikings doing really well on especially water
Nomad and bog Islands there's a bit of internal consistency here supporting those three as some
of the best water sips on the other hand garage at number two is pretty interesting and carried
almost entirely by how well they're doing on Golden swamp despite having a decent amount
of water on that map it's really the Cavalry civs that are dominating that's the swamp maps and now
let's move on and check on these so-called hybrid Maps which are ones where you have lakes you would
typically dock to add a fish boom while often going mainly for land military units the three
popular ones featured on the ranked ladder are Four Lakes Scandinavia and kawasan this time we
actually have a hundred and fifty thousand games about three quarters of which are Four Lakes so
arguably this is just the four lakes top civ list interestingly despite water being a focus of the
early action we have almost a completely different list of civilizations the top five this time are
Persians berbers Japanese lithuanians and Huns at number one the Vikings in Malay are actually
below average in their results funny enough and Italians and byzantines are hovering around a 50
win rate so you can really see that despite water being present it's an almost completely different
set of bonuses and civilizations that excel in fact it's pretty clear being a good water civ
in isolation has very little predictive power of how good a Sith will be on Four Lakes Japanese and
Persians are probably the easiest to explain here as their faster fishing ship work rate
and dock work rate bonuses respectively are helpful for booming on safe legs outside of
fishing bonuses there's also a real Cavalry civ theme coming through and it's understandable that
map Mobility would be important giving players starting towns are fairly exposed and you have
to travel to different lakes to try to dock the berber's faster moving villagers are probably
also helping them a bit here as well so if we had to make a single list of what are the best water
map civs what would we get well using a weighted average of all three types the best performers are
number one dravidians followed by Italians then Vikings then berbers which did well on both the
swamp and hybrid Maps but not so well on the pure water maps and finally at number 5 the Japanese
take from that which you will but personally I'm going to be sticking with Japanese for
the better fishing ships Galley line of sight and delightfully cheap camps but there were still some
interesting results there that I wanted to share thanks for watching and I'll see you next time