I thought about something kinda cool.

What if someone coded a program which shows the average amount of times people picked each territory on a certain template.

For instance, on Rise of Rome, someone creates a tool which auto-updates on my specific template, showing how many times people are picking Caledonia Inferior, Ciresium, Gelecja, etc. To put this further into perspective, it will tell me that within the last 100 games, 48 people have picked Caledonia Inferior, and 21 people have picked Troesmis. This teaches me that there is higher probability that if I pick Darnini to counter Caledonia Inferior, I will more likely have a successful counter than choosing Praetoria Augusta to counter Tyras.

The point is, if we know how often people are picking these spots in comparison to other spots, we can more easily use this knowledge of probability to counter opponents even more easily, particularly in full distribution games, so the tool would be able to take countering to the next level because it would allow us to more easily experiment with probability and chance to product fun results. Any thoughts?

You would need the API for that, but you can't get data in games that aren't created by the API, tournaments, ladders or CLOTs. So if you make a tournament or a series of tournaments you could get the data off of it.

A few thoughts--

First, wouldn't the probability get skewed by people who don't know what they're doing? Out of the last 100 games for example, if you don't screen for skill only two or three of those matches might be relevant in quality, depending on the template.

Second, supposing we did use such a probability calculator, two different outcomes seem likely--

First, on templates with wastelands, it wouldn't really tell us much
Second, on templates without wastelands (taking RoR again as an example) everyone with access to the calculator would make picks to counter the calculator, rendering it inoperable over time. It would be a statistical cat and mouse game.

It’s possible to do it without API, but looping through every game using web browser to render the game then reading the settings is much more resource consuming than using the API.

I think someone did this or something similar a while back with the 1v1 ladder.

Smileyleg did it for the 1v1 ladder. Great little thread

It would be interesting to do this, and show it as a heatmap on the actual map.