Grid Sage Forums

Anyone who has opted to automatically upload their score sheet at the end of each run (set in the options menu) can check the high scores here (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).

High score updates only happen once per day. More details on the page itself.

(This is just a test system in preparation for leaderboards that will gradually expand to include more features, and maybe one day be automated.)

Very neat

Update 150901: For probably a few days here I've paused the high score chart while I prepare a new one--bigger, better, all around awesomer. Alpha 3 will have a new test system during preparations for the upcoming tournament.

Clarification?  Have only the public updates paused, or has back-end score collection stopped? (if I get a killer score today, will it appear when the new chart goes up?)

Sorry, I just meant that I'm temporarily not updating the web page (I've been doing that manually all along). The back-end is unchanged, and scores are still uploaded and received as always.

I will be using all previously collected Alpha 3 scores in the first new page when it's ready!

And, by the way, if for some reason someone doesn't have an internet connection when they end their game and you really really want your score on the board, you can also email me your scoresheet and I can just copy it over to the system. (This isn't so much an issue now with the temporary leaderboards, but could become more important during the tournament.)

I've gone ahead and reinstated the original high score format (reset as of Alpha 3), since I've made some changes that will require releasing an Alpha 3c before it would be compatible with the latest and greatest leaderboards (currently WIP). So we'll continue using the old format for a little while longer.

Yes, Adraius, your win is up there ;)

Following the Alpha Challenge 2015, I've restarted the High Scores leaderboard and moved it to a slightly different location (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/). It links to archived scores from previous lists, and will continue to receive updates as before (though once again not as frequently as during the tournament).

New update to the High Scores (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) page as of Alpha 5: It now also lists the furthest area reached by each player, to give more credit to speed builds. Note that where ties are concerned on the second table, the most recent record gets the higher spot.

As usual there will continue to be incremental improvements in the future.

For the new release I reset the leaderboards again, and the first batch of participants is up now (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).

Something* tells me we won't be seeing as many ascensions with Alpha 7...

*Okay, Hunters.

Reset the leaderboards (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) again now that we have Alpha 8.

We've started off, unsurprisingly, with a higher ratio of cave-related deaths, including my own :P

The Great Reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) has occurred once again, this time for Alpha 9!

The final numbers for Alpha 8 stats show that in 258 reported runs, 17,165 robots were destroyed, among them 5,374 Grunts and 69 Behemoths.

In all, 22,238 parts were attached--3,421 power; 5,380 propulsion; 5,574 utilities; 7,863 weapons.

42,224 volleys were fired, averaging a maximum size of 2.74 weapons each. Out of 96,012 individual shots, 60,043 hit a target. 3.7% of shots were from a launcher.

1,546,152 points of damage was inflicted on targets, 47,748 (3.09%) of it self-inflicted via explosions.

1,357 targets were rammed, dealing 0.27% of all damage.

440 Haulers were intercepted (121 by Decker alone), 236 robots corrupted, and only 4 melted outright.

Target communications were jammed 9,839 times, 2,040 of those in a single run by Adraius.

261 Drones were launched, but only 7 ever recovered.

Average movement speed was 120%.

The average run visited 7 maps, while the single most expansive run, by Sherlockkat, saw 22.

An average 5 items were carried in inventory at any given time, with average inventory size peaking at 8.78.

2,679 machines were hacked an average 2.72 times each, with 44.2% of hacking attempts successful. 25.36% of hacks were entered manually; 27.44% of those were Trojans and brute force hacks. The most common hack was terminal records (lore).

21.28% of hacked machines were fully traced.

103 garrisons were disabled.

The most effective force of allies, led by Sherlockkat, inflicted 1,105 damage and made 14 kills.

Most dangerous ascension goes to Decker, who spent a quarter of an entire run at maximum alert (5).

Fastest win goes to zxc, who surfaced in only 1,108 turns, without destroying a single robot (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=490.0).

Only 11 pieces of alien tech were identified.

Today the leaderboards (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) were reset for Alpha 10.

Time for some stats from the last release!

Of 601 uploaded score sheets, we had a total 7 wins by zxc (3), Sherlockkat (3) and myself (1). Happylisk reported the highest score, 24,115. (Note: Old scores are always preserved in the archives (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-160608-160808.html) linked at the bottom of the scores page.)

1,669 evolutions took place, the most popular slots being utilities (37.2%), followed by propulsion (25.2%), weapons (22.5%) and power (15.1%).

At each depth survived Cogminds had an average 75% core integrity remaining.

33,478 robots were destroyed, among them 11,640 Grunts, 7,594 Swarmers, 3,065 Sentries, 971 Programmers, 891 Hunters, and 81 Behemoths.

18 ARCs were destroyed before they could deploy, 1,723 annoying Recyclers were blasted, and desperate players took out 43 Compactors. Only 1 Executioner was eliminated.

Decker had the best combat robot kill streak, destroying 21 armed robots in rapid succession.

88,268 volleys were fired, averaging a maximum size of 2.69 weapons each. Out of 180,643 individual shots, 115,004 hit a target. 3.8% of shots were from a launcher.

2,748,369 points of damage was inflicted on targets, 85,007 (3.09%) of it self-inflicted via explosions.

2,979 targets were rammed, dealing 0.36% of all damage. 425 robots were corrupted, and only 6 melted outright.

191 robots were successfully hacked, 101 of them armed. 22 of those were assimilated, 19 overloaded, and 68 rebooted. Assimilated engineers tore down 8 walls, all in a single run by endlessblaze.

Enemy communications were jammed 11,219 times.

In all, 44,031 parts were attached--7,161 power; 11,231 propulsion; 10,456 utilities; 15,183 weapons. 19,867 of those attached parts were destroyed. Slot usage rate averaged 82.2%.

1,898,821 turns were passed, 15,924 (0.83%) while naked. 13 teleports were confirmed.

The average run visited 6.63 maps, while the single most expansive run, by Sherlockkat, saw 25.

540 derelict logs were recovered.

An average 5 items were carried in inventory at any given time, with average inventory size peaking at 8.56.

3,386 machines were disabled.

7,066 machines were hacked an average 2.72 times each, with 49.7% of hacking attempts successful. 24.1% of hacks were entered manually; 46.5% of those were Trojans and brute force hacks. The most common hack was terminal records (lore).

78 data cores were recovered, 27 of which were used.

11.7% of hacked machines were fully traced.

215 garrisons were disabled.

A total of 32 pieces of alien tech were identified.


Meta stats: 81% of players use fullscreen; 9.5% use hjkl for movement; 21% prefer ASCII; 27% don't touch the mouse. Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (52.4%), followed by Terminus (22.6%), and Cog (13.1%).

Can I submit scores from before I had set them to be uploaded automatically? Here are few of mine.

Sure! I'll add them to the batch. (You're doing pretty awesome already, it would seem :D)

The final Alpha 10 stat summary is in! (Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 915 uploaded score sheets, 618 had a high enough score (>=500) to be included in the stats. 95 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 11 wins by zxc (5), Sherlockkat (2), Decker (2), Amphouse (1) and PleasingFungus (1). Decker blew everyone's score out of the water with his alert farming tactics, earning a 50,390 high. I can see scores continuing to rise as Cogminds have access to increasingly powerful components, plus numerous sources of bonus points via the new plot elements.

(note: some basic stats are not all that different from previous releases, and are omitted here--I'm just picking out things which might be interesting)

The highest number of bonus points earned in a single run was 27,640, by Sherlockkat, much of them from winning in only 3,131 turns.

920 garrison reinforcements were sent out, making up 13.2% of all squad dispatches. The most garrisons entered in a single run was 3, by ATM. 43 were visited in all, 248 were disabled from the outside, and 7 phase generators were destroyed during infiltrations.

36,321 robots were destroyed, 749 of them in the single-most destructive run by Decker. 26 Saboteurs were downed before they could detonate. Only 4 ARCs were destroyed before they could deploy. On the large end, 70 Behemoths were brought down, as well as 23 Compactors.

356 robots were corrupted; chain reactions were caused in 941 power sources.

48,175 parts were attached, 43% of which were lost. 34.7% of all parts attached were weapons, the most common category.

25 pieces of alien tech were recovered in all.

The highest speed achieved, by Sherlockkat, was 588%, or moving nearly 6 times per turn.

The most number of wheels used at once was 6, by Geralt.

Highest temperature reached was 2,446, by BoomBlip.

468 drones were launched, 33 recovered.

83 data cores were recovered, of which 29 were used. Of 22,780 machine hacks, 22.9% (5,211) were manual. 99 squads were recalled, including 54 investigations, 28 reinforcements, 15 exterminations, and 2 assaults. 2 Fabricators were overloaded. 40 robots and 155 parts were built. 322 parts were repaired.

54 traps were reprogrammed.

272 robots were rewired, 312 were successfully hacked (most commonly links and reboots, but there were 55 assimilations as well).

The average system corruption on death/winning was 2.6%, while the highest was 50%.

Meta stats:

• 83% of players use fullscreen
• 9.5% use hjkl for movement
• 26.3% prefer ASCII
• 30.5% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (64.2%), followed by Terminus (16.8%), and X11 (8.4%)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (59.0%), with 30.5% of players using something lower, and 10.5% higher

Alpha 11 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 1,563 uploaded score sheets, 1,097 had a high enough score (>=500) to be included in the stats. 113 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 40 wins by zxc (19), Sherlockkat (9), Decker (9), Amphouse (1), Happylisk (1), and Timesplitter (1).

zxc achieved a new Cogmind all-time high score, 73,217 points for a speed run of only 764 turns (based on the new fast win scoring bonus formula). (He didn't record that one, but you can watch his 911-turn win here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrSUrI4pCyA), and read about the 764-turn win here (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=636.0).)

A few speed-running Cogminds are part of the reason for the higher than usual run count this alpha, but we also saw an influx of new players from the RPS article (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/11/cogmind-robot-roguelike/) last month, right after the Alpha 11 update.

The average score was 4,947, though the median was much lower (2,762). Taking each player's best individual score, the average was 6,833 (median 4,547).

The most regions visited in a single run was 30, by zxc.

Congratulations to Ixoran for being the first to achieve the maximum possible speed, moving at 20 spaces per turn. Time itself practically stopped for this Cogmind.

There were 11,165 critical hits in all (will be interesting to see if this comes down following KI nerf) but only 1 robot was melted (<--we're definitely going to see that change in Alpha 12!).

Decker destroyed the most Behemoths in a single run: 5.

TrashT murdered 12 Zionites before succumbing to their wrath.

336 Assembled were destroyed.

Codemo fired the hottest volley of Alpha 11, generating +675 heat.

Some max individual run values, highest...
  Hauler interceptions:       26
  Robots corrupted:           32
  Power chain reactions:      37
  Communications jammed:      2,264
  Parts field recycled:       114
  Drone launches:             37
  Traps triggered:            95
  Garrisons disabled:         20
  Robots built:               12
  Parts built:                21
  Parts repaired:             13
  Robots hacked:              85
  Robots overloaded:          45
  Robots assimilated:         24
  Manual hacks:               209
  Trojans/brute force hacks:  76
  Full trace events:          20

Most popular hacks by the number of successful results:
  Zone Layout          1018
  Record               3217
  Part Schematic       900
  Prototype ID Bank    729
  Alert Level          700
  Open Door            650
  Locate Traps         565
  Unreport Threat      487
  Machine Controls     349
  Level Access Points  346

Out of 38,500 machine hacks, 738 Trojans were installed (661 at terminals). 33.8% of hacks targeted machines other than terminals.

The top 5 lore collectors are
  zzxc         83%
  Amphouse     62%
  Decker       60%
  Sherlockkat  48%
  Kalkkis      45%

The top 5 item collectors are
  Decker     83%
  zzxc       77%
  Amphouse   71%
  Enno       70%
  Magi163    69%

209 pieces of alien tech were recovered in all, but by only 11 different players because yeah most of that stuff is later in the game.

The average system corruption on death/winning was 2.5%, while the highest was 50% (experienced by Chad).

Meta stats:

• 80.5% of players use fullscreen
• 14.1% use hjkl for movement
• 26.5% prefer ASCII
• 32.7% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (65.4%), followed by Terminus (17.6%), and Cog (6.2%)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (46.0%), with 46.0% of players using something lower, and 8.0% higher

Leaderboard (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) scores now link to score sheet stats! Note that if you've been to the page before, you might need to hit Ctrl-F5 to fully reload the new css before it'll appear normally for you (otherwise the colors could be off).

Example

(https://i.imgur.com/jKPw1uI.gif)

[close]

Alpha 12 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 1,171 uploaded score sheets, 808 had a high enough score (>= 500) to be included in the stats. 125 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 30 wins by Sherlockkat (15), lsend (4), Widmo (3), zxc (2), myself (2), ddarkray (1), Raato (1), Zaltroth (1), and BookofAeons (1).

zxc again broke the all-time high score record, with 90,820 points for basically owning the late-game and farming in an accidentally-too-easy Alpha 12. A single run spanning nearly 11 hours!

The average score was 5,319, though the median was much lower (2,862). Taking each player's best individual score, the average was 6,742 (median 3,742).

The most regions visited in a single run was 38, by Sherlockkat, a new all-time high.

Sherlockkat also disabled the most garrisons in a single run (19), followed closely by Widmo (18).

Widmo earns the title of most OP hacker, with a +200% bonus to hacking attack rolls. (We'll get a ton more interesting data like this with Alpha 13, now that more loadout capability-specific stats are recorded in score sheets!)

Regarding the damage type updates for Alpha 12--nerfed kinetics and buffed thermal, there were definitely some changes in what players were using. Compare the number of shots of each damage type:
  Alpha: 11      12
  KI     61.5%   51.9%
  TH     23.9%   30.7%
  EX     2.7%    3.8%
  EM     11.9%   13.6%

Maximums for total time spent on a given floor type:
(0b10)
  Materials    Widmo     13,936
  Factory      Widmo     16,272
  Research     Kyzrati   4,727
  Access       Kyzrati   6,666
(other common areas)
  Mines        Widmo     2,254
  Storage      Widmo     2,834
  Garrison     ddarkray  2,428
  Lower Caves  lord      5,008
  Upper Caves  ddarkray  3,485

Some max individual run values, highest...
          Overflow Damage  1,091 (Amphouse)
         Heat Transferred  28,406 (Kyzrati)
             Parts Melted  54 (Kyzrati)
             Traps Reused  22 (ddarkray)
         Best Kill Streak  72 (Sherlockkat)
           Targets Rammed  60 (Toskin)
       Cave-ins Triggered  28 (dak)
    Self-inflicted Damage  1,429 (Widmo)
       Highest Corruption  54 (Kyzrati)
    Power Chain Reactions  37 (Widmo)
       Garrisons Disabled  19 (Sherlockkat)
             Robots Built  14 (277)
           Robots Rewired  25 (gammafunk)
            Robots Hacked  552 (zxc)
              Parts Built  31 (Sherlockkat)
          Traps Extracted  82 (Sherlockkat)
  Derelict Logs Recovered  14 (zxc)
     Exploration Rate (%)  78 (Widmo)
    Network Hubs Disabled  3 (Widmo)
            Actions Taken  46,572 (Widmo)
             Bonus Points  50,819 (Sherlockkat)

The top 5 lore collectors are
          zxc  84%
  Sherlockkat  77%
        Widmo  70%
      Gressup  61%
     Amphouse  61%

The top 5 item collectors are
        Widmo  81%
          zxc  73%
  Sherlockkat  69%
     Amphouse  68%
    Happylisk  67%

Meta stats:

• 89.6% of players use fullscreen (30% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 16.8% use hjkl for movement (continues to rise with every release!)
• 20.8% prefer ASCII
• 36.8% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (70.4%), followed by Terminus (11.2%), and X11 (5.6%) (12.8% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (44.8%), with 44.0% of players using something lower, and 11.2% higher

Alpha 13 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 968 uploaded score sheets, 696 had a high enough score (>= 500) to be included in the stats. 107 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 15 wins by Sherlockkat (5), Shobalk (3), lsend (2), GJ (2), DDarkRay (2) and zxc (1).

Of course, while zxc only had a single win, it was his only run for the month and easily the highest scoring ever at a 26-hour "I own you all now" 276,549 points. (Now that Alpha 14 finally includes High Security, it's unlikely we'll ever see anything like that again!)

The average score was 5,668, a little higher than last time, with a higher median as well (3,048). Taking each player's best individual score, the average was 7,462 (median 4,932--definitely an upward trend).

Funniest manual seed goes to Senjai, who played a run with "cogmindhatesme", which ironically turned out to be the highest scoring of all his 14 A13 runs (9,063).

This time let's take a look at many of the new "Best States" recorded by score sheets as of Alpha 13:

          Heat Dissipation  179 (Conner)
           Energy Capacity  2,530 (GJ)
           Matter Capacity  1,050 (Dekar)
               Sight Range  24 (GJ, Kyzrati, Sherlockkat, Shobalk)
          Robot Scan Range  30 (Sherlockkat, gammafunk, zxc)
        Terrain Scan Range  30 (nikola kolodziejczyk)
      Terrain Scan Density  2,410 (zxc)
              ECM Strength  8 (Sherlockkat)
            Cloak Strength  4 (MorlocK)
       Power Amplification  40 (Raine, lsend)
   Additional Mass Support  24 (Anonymous)
              EM Shielding  4 (Kyzrati, Sherlockkat)
        Armor Coverage (%)  99 (Conner)
            Resistance: KI  40 (gammafunk, Kyzrati, Shobalk, Xanthos)
            Resistance: TH  75 (Sherlockkat, Shobalk)
            Resistance: EX  75 (GJ)
            Resistance: EM  100 (Sherlockkat)
             Resistance: I  40 (gammafunk)
             Resistance: S  40 (gammafunk)
             Resistance: P  40 (gammafunk)
           Power Shielding  90 (eatnumber, Shobalk)
      Propulsion Shielding  90 (zxc)
      Point Defense Rating  240 (Amphouse, Sherlockkat, Xanthos)
        Thermal Conversion  180 (Raine)
            Weapon Cycling  50 (GJ)
         Melee Speed Boost  50 (Sherlockkat)
            Phase Shifting  30 (Sherlockkat)
               Evasion (%)  86 (Sherlockkat)
        Targeting Accuracy  40 (ParanoidSupernaut)
            Melee Accuracy  24 (buthix9)
         Launcher Accuracy  40 (Amphouse)
           Target Analysis  36 (Shobalk)
             Core Analysis  15 (Shobalk)
  Armor Integrity Analysis  100 (aaa, nikola kolodziejczyk, Mogwok)
          Recoil Reduction  10 (gammafunk)
    Overload Amplification  75 (ParanoidSupernaut)
       Overload Regulation  40 (Dekar)
          Stasis Canceling  3 (lsend)
         Offensive Hacking  237 (zxc)
         Defensive Hacking  54 (Shobalk)

Slight tweaks to Materials, and lots of extra beneficial encounters in the Mines, had the intended effect of reducing the number of early losses there. Deaths in the Mines especially dropped from 8.3% in Alpha 12 to 6.0%.

Among the new features that decreased the difficulty of some areas, 1,833 piles of Scrap were searched, the most in a single run by Shobalk (30).

Lore collection across all reporting players averages 11.0%; item collection stands at 20.5%.

Meta stats:

• 87.9% of players use fullscreen (32% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 17.8% use hjkl for movement (still rising with every release!)
• 25.2% prefer ASCII
• 38.3% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (69.2%), followed by Terminus (15.0%), and X11/Dina (4.7% each) (6.4% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (49.0%), with 39.8% of players using something lower, and 11.2% higher

Alpha 14 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 984 uploaded score sheets, 833 had a high enough score (>= 500) to be included in the stats. 122 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 35 wins by GJ (10), MTF (6), lsend (5), zxc (5), Sherlockkat (4), Shobalk (3), may2ever (1), and Pimski (1).

The average score was 6,749, continuing to rise with every release. This is in part due to additional sources of bonus points, but overall player skill is increasing as well. (We'll probably see this rise a good bit in the next release now that there are bonus points for ally kills and at higher alert levels) Taking each player's best individual score, the average was 8,413, though the median (4,545) dropped slightly from Alpha 13.
By UI settings, based on best individual runs players using the mouse and/or tiles averaged around 8,000 points, while ASCII-and-keyboard purists earned an average 15,211.

31.9% of deaths were in Materials, 20.5% in Factory, 13.6% in some form of cave system, 8.5% in Storage, and 8.3% in Mines (17.2% were in other areas). In all, 25.5% of deaths were in the upper half of the world.

Altogether players achieved 2,765 evolutions. That's a lot of slots: 56.3% Utility, 22.6% Propulsion, 13.5% Weapons, and 8.1% Power.

High Security was triggered only 12 times, by GJ, MTF and Sherlockkat.

Alpha 14 was the first release to include easier difficulty modes! Most reporting players, however, stuck to the default roguelike mode:
  Mode       Runs
  Default    97.2%
  Easy       1.4%
  Easier     1.3%
Those playing easier modes tended to score higher--no surprise there. I'm sure we'll see those modes getting more use in the future on Steam. More players may even be using them now than we know, but are not the type who want to upload their scores, or have simply turned off uploading for the duration :P

Alpha 14 also added Cogmind's first two challenge modes, Scavenger and Unstable Evolution. There were 7 Scavenger runs, 1 by DDarkRay and the rest all by GJ, who won 3 of them. There were 10 Unstable Evolution runs, several by myself, Amphouse, and DDarkRay, while the remaining half were by GJ, again with the same three wins (because they were all double challenges :P).

For Beta 1, the latest iteration of the leaderboards has added a dedicated challenge mode for all those trying to score extra points by taking challenges. Check out the challenge thread (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=715.0) for descriptions/details and set them in your /user/cogmind.cfg file to participate!

"Best States" record holders from Alpha 14:

          Heat Dissipation  229 (Conner)
         Coolant Potential  240 (Anonymous)
           Energy Capacity  3,440 (GJ)
           Matter Capacity  1,200 (Pimski)
        Terrain Scan Range  30 (GJ)
      Terrain Scan Density  2,010 (Decker, GJ)
            Cloak Strength  4 (GJ)
       Power Amplification  60 (MTF)
   Additional Mass Support  32 (GJ, RandomString)
              EM Shielding  4 (GJ, Codemo, Pimski)
        Armor Coverage (%)  100 (GJ)
            Resistance: KI  55 (Phragmented, Zaltroth)
            Resistance: TH  60 (Phragmented)
            Resistance: EX  75 (GJ, MTF, Shobalk)
            Resistance: EM  100 (Sherlockkat)
            Core Shielding  40 (Conner, Kyzrati, MTF)
           Power Shielding  90 (Dekar, MTF, Nikola Kolodziejczyk)
      Propulsion Shielding  90 (Anonymous, WER6)
            Weapon Cycling  50 (GJ, may2ever)
         Melee Speed Boost  50 (MTF, Nikola Kolodziejczyk, Sherlockkat)
               Evasion (%)  93 (MTF)
        Targeting Accuracy  46 (GJ)
            Melee Accuracy  40 (Nikola Kolodziejczyk)
         Launcher Accuracy  40 (Conner, GJ, MTF)
           Target Analysis  32 (gammafunk)
             Core Analysis  15 (Codemo, GJ, Moredread)
  Armor Integrity Analysis  180 (GJ)
          Recoil Reduction  12 (Codemo)
         Particle Charging  100 (Moredread)
       Overload Regulation  60 (Pimski)
         Offensive Hacking  165 (MTF)
         Defensive Hacking  69 (MTF)

Lore collection across all reporting players averages 23.2% (more than double the Alpha 13 rate); item collection stands at 34.7% (also a significant increase). GJ had both the largest lore (97%) and gallery collection (99%), which took a big dive at the start of Beta 1 due to of all the new collectables.

Meta stats:

• 83.6% of players use fullscreen (27.5% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 14.7% use hjkl for movement
• 24.5% prefer ASCII
• 32.0% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (75.4%), followed by Terminus (13.1%), and Cog (5.7%) (5.8% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (45.9%), with 38.5% of players using something lower, and 15.6% higher

Beta 1 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom.)

Of 902 uploaded score sheets, 783 had a high enough score (>= 500) to be included in the stats. 125 unique players opted in to stat reporting, and we had a total 66 wins (a record high!) by Sherlockkat (13), zxc (13), lsend (9), GJ (8), MTF (7), Nikola Kolodziejczyk (6), Raine (3), DDarkRay (2), Palikka (2), Sabi Hakuhei (2), and Kyzrati (1). The higher number of wins can be attributed to three factors:
- Some players started using the easier difficulty modes
- Beta 1 added all seven different endings, sparking players to find how to collect them all
- And some of the regular players have been getting better :D

As predicted in the previous summary, the average score jumped to a new high again, reaching 8,035, though the best individual score average actually fell a bit to 7,238 as a larger number of new players joined for Beta (or returned for it after being away).

Beta 1 was only the second release since adding difficulty modes, so let's check out those stats again. Although most runs stick to the roguelike default, there's been a slight uptick in the number of players lowering the difficulty level, at least for some of their runs.
  Mode       Runs
  Default    95.0%
  Easier     2.8%
  Easiest    2.2%
9 different players played Easier mode; 5 played on Easiest.

Beta 1 added a new batch of challenge modes, of which there are now 8. It was also the first version with dedicated challenge leaderboards, occupied by a handful of players who'd already won the main game and wanted to try something a bit different. A total of 42 challenge modes were applied. The older Scavenger and Unstable Evolution challenges were only used twice each, while the most popular was clearly Pure Core (15). Super Gauntlet, undoubtedly Cogmind's most challenging mode, was played 9 times, while its tamer little brother Gauntlet was tried out just twice. All remaining three modes were tried out a bit as well, Devolution (4), Inhibited Evolution (2), and No Salvage (6). (You can read about the different challenges in their thread (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=715.0).)

"Best States" record holders (for select stats) from Beta 1:

          Heat Dissipation  252 (GJ)
         Coolant Potential  360 (SpookUrDad)
           Energy Capacity  2,470 (Sherlockkat)
           Matter Capacity  1,800 (GJ)
       Power Amplification  180 (GJ)
   Additional Mass Support  25 (MTF, Palikka)
        Armor Coverage (%)  100 (RandomString)
            Resistance: KI  50 (Raine)
            Resistance: TH  60 (MTF, Sherlockkat, zxc)
            Resistance: EX  75 (DDarkRay, MTF, Sherlockkat, zxc)
            Resistance: EM  100 (GJ, Sherlockkat, zxc)
      Point Defense Rating  480 (Sherlockkat)
            Weapon Cycling  50 (GJ, Raine)
         Melee Speed Boost  50 (GJ, MTF, Noname1208, zxc)
               Evasion (%)  112 (zxc)
        Targeting Accuracy  60 (Palikka)
            Melee Accuracy  32 (Palikka, MTF)
         Launcher Accuracy  160 (Raine)
           Target Analysis  44 (Sherlockkat)
  Armor Integrity Analysis  100 (Antanst, Noname1208)
          Recoil Reduction  12 (GJ)
         Particle Charging  135 (zxc)
          Stasis Canceling  6 (Kyzrati)
         Offensive Hacking  194 (MTF)
         Defensive Hacking  78 (Palikka)

DDarkRay installed the most traps (39) in a single run (also setting a record high for traps triggered: 39 :P). Horse also installed quite a few (27).

Among the new mechanics, a fair number of players took advantage of tread crushing, but none came close to GJ's 152 robot-crushing run (also setting a ramming record of 711, since tread builds are immune to damage when ramming :P). BadToken (19), PyroL (17), and may2ever (15) kicked the most bots out of the way.

Melee builds have certainly matured quite a lot given the streak of buffs over many previous releases, and more players are relying on it as a support, or even primary, strategy. 14.9% of runs recorded more than 100 Cogmind melee attacks, and 7.0% had more than 200. There were 6,483 sneak attacks (max: 219 by MTF) and 2,326 follow-up attacks (max: 958 by zxc). Melee damage distribution:
  Impact    5,402 (11.9%)
  Slashing  28,388 (62.5%)
  Piercing  11,658 (25.6%)

This time let's also analyze how players are choosing to traverse the world (or in some cases, "end up traversing" the world, since some people just wander or don't/can't check where they're heading first :D). For this I tallied the percentage of runs that entered a general branch, considering only those runs which passed through the depths from which the given area was accessible:
  Min. Evolutions  Visit%  Area   
              2    42.9%   Mines
              3    18.4%   Storage branch
              3    27.2%   Lower caves
              5    31.5%   Upper caves
              6    43.8%   Special caves
              6    22.9%   0b10 Factory branches
              8    44.5%   Research branches

Plot-related stuff, described in cryptic terms to avoid spoilers:

• Cogmind was imprinted in 14.7% of all runs; 23 players (2.9% of runs) decided not to imprint despite having the chance. 54.5% of winning runs were imprinted, with 5 winners (7.6%) choosing not to imprint.
• 4 runs interfaced with DC and went on to win, of 10 total runs choosing to do so.
• 34 winning Cogminds visited W, of 77 visits in all (44.2%).
• 13 wins were achieved with a reset core, out of 27 total resets (48.1%).

Beta 1 was the first opportunity to find alternative endings (and see all the different animations to conclude the story in different ways :D). 44 (two-thirds of) wins were of the easiest default type, "#0." Totals for other win types:
  Win#  Runs
    1    4
    2    8
    3    4
    4    0
    5    1
    6    5
No scores were uploaded for win #4, which isn't the most difficult but is a little harder to figure out.

Lore collection across all reporting players averages 23.3% (around the same as Beta 1, despite all the lore that was added then); item collection stands at 35.6% (also relatively unchanged). GJ had both the largest lore (96%) and gallery collection (99%), quite close to becoming the first person to have discovered everything.

Meta stats:

• 90.4% of players use fullscreen (29.2% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 15.2% use hjkl for movement
• 17.6% prefer ASCII, a sudden new low!
• 29.6% don't touch the mouse
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (64.8%), followed by Terminus (16.0%), and Cog (9.6%) (9.6% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (44.8%), with 36.0% of players using something lower, and 19.2% higher

Beta 3 Stat Summary
(Scores have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/), with old scores archived at the bottom. I've also added section links since the boards can get quite lengthy.)

This time I've done something a little different than usual. Because we have a ton of new data, rather than just posting everything here in the forum thread I've made a bigger production of the stats with a bunch of graphs and analysis over on the blog (http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2017/12/player-metrics-stats-preferences-steam/). However, below I've also shared some player-specific stats from Beta 3 that you won't find in that post.

"Best States" record holders (for select stats) from Beta 3 (excludes anonymous players):

          Heat Dissipation  265 (Happylisk)
         Coolant Potential  360 (squished)
           Energy Capacity  3,900 (Quelan)
           Matter Capacity  1,800 (Sherlockkat, Tron)
       Power Amplification  120 (Megumin)
   Additional Mass Support  36 (Tripdrake)
            Resistance: KI  40 (AlStar)
            Resistance: TH  75 (Fenrir, GJ, Malth, Valguris)
            Resistance: EX  75 (bugsniper, GJ)
            Resistance: EM  100 (GJ)
      Point Defense Rating  480 (Amphouse)
         Melee Speed Boost  50 (BigZombie, GJ, Highsight, nataya, PyroDawn, Quelan)
               Evasion (%)  109 (Quelan)
        Targeting Accuracy  64 (RBrandon)
            Melee Accuracy  32 (anonynamja, Quelan, Questking, Palikka)
         Launcher Accuracy  120 (Destravous)
          Recoil Reduction  12 (nataya)
         Particle Charging  50 (Dean)
               Force Boost  12 (Quelan)
         Salvage Targeting  15 (M.U.L.E.)
         Offensive Hacking  156 (GJ)
         Defensive Hacking  70 (Quelan)

Other personal single-run records that stand out among the others:

• Legolas destroyed a mindboggling 1,597 robots. That was in Easiest Mode, but still...
• Playing in regular mode, kiedra wasn't too far behind with 1,431 kills.
• GJ used the most alien tech by far, taking all top three slots in that category.
• GJ earned the most bonus points with 78,771.
• Valguris has the honor of being the only player to die to system corruption, reaching 102% on the last floor. Not far behind was BigZombie, up to 93% corruption at death in Research
• Palikka had more propulsion slots than anyone else, 13, during one of their wins.
• Miruya used the most wheels at once: 6
• Kyzrati had 8 weapon slots at once (heh I streamed that run, too--reached the end but it was suboptimal and I ended up losing :P)
• GJ had the highest peak rating, at 248. Archivar and lsend tied for wins with the lowest peak rating: 77
• GJ also earned the greatest number of points for follower kills: 11,374
• Joking_Phantom and Raine tied for the most garrisons entered: 4
• Highest win speed bonus goes to zxc, 41,152 points for winning in only 1,214 turns with 2,627 actions taken.
• GJ destroyed 7 major NPCs.
• Quelan had the longest kill streak of combat bots: 72
• kiedra collected 61,401 matter.
• kiedra also attached the most parts: 1,425 (59.8% utilities, 29.3% weapons)
• zxc had the most consistent high slot usage, keeping slots 99% occupied through an entire winning run.
• Zephyr survived 5,824 turns while naked.
• BigZombie moved 32,623 spaces.
• GJ was the only player to move 16 spaces per turn, just short of the fastest possible speed.
• PyroDawn had the highest average speed: 410%
• fqgglt suffered 2 propulsion burnouts.
• Tron kicked 46 bots.
• GJ crushed 22 bots.
• Legolas corrupted 402 bots.
• Jarchon melted 11 bots.
• Zephyr triggered 161 cave-ins.
• Raine had the greatest mass support: 310
• Palikka ran around for the longest time while overweight by 10x.
• GJ both carried the most items at once (52) and had the highest average carry rate (27).
• fpsbossfight fired the hottest volley: 738
• kiedra had 352 critical hit kills.
• Kalkkis fired 213 overloaded shots.
• BigZombie executed 1,427 melee attacks across a melee win.
• Logrus had the most multiwielding followup melee attacks: 370
• LuckyLuckLuc dealt 1,148 overflow damage.
• Legolas reached a temperature of 2,116.
• kiedra intercepted 50 Haulers.
• Legolas triggered 151 power chain reactions.
• squished jammed communications 19 times.
• Lt Dan merge-repaired 19 parts.
• GJ launched 68 drones
• Ida recovered 24 drones.
• Soar fabricated 36 traps.
• BigZombie reprogrammed 52 traps.
• Quelan triggered 65 traps.
• Quelan also recovered the most data cores: 12 (but used only half of them)
• BigZombie hacked 243 machines (782 hacks in all).
• nink was fully traced 103 times.
• PyroDawn installed 241 Trojans (78.4% on Terminals).
• Quelan overloaded 3 Fabricators.
• GJ built 20 robots.
• BigZombie built 36 parts, and repaired 194.
• Quelan rewired 53 robots.
• BigZombie hacked 121 robots (among them 65 combat bots).
• GJ had 22 allies hacked, but successfully repelled 3 other attempts.
• GJ had the most allies (255) and the largest group at once (35).
• GJ triggered high security 5 times (and still won!). 359 squads were dispatched that run (300 of them assaults).
• Pimski visited the most regions: 38
• DDarkray spent the most time in Garrisons (13,467 turns).
• GJ spent the most time in Waste (1,777 turns).

Beta 4 Stat Summary
(Leaderboards have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).)

Time for another stat summary! Note it's just this forum post, whereas I won't be doing such a complete analysis as I did for the Beta 3 stats (http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2017/12/player-metrics-stats-preferences-steam/)--that was a special case since we suddenly had so many new players from the Steam release.

8,793 score sheets were uploaded over previous Beta's four weeks, 7,097 (80.7%) of those with a high enough score (>=500) to be included in the stats. 4,923 (69.4%) of the remaining runs were anonymous, however, so the stats will focus on the 2,174 runs by named players. There were 653 unique players in all, 432 (66.2%) of which were non-anonymous.

Not unlike Cogmind's alpha launch back in 2015 there was a huge surge of players for Beta 3, and the run count dropped off over the next month or two, though still propped up a bit by the new surge of players during the Winter Sale. This Beta was also pretty short, only taking four weeks to release, so that also contributed to its lower run count.

There were 67 wins by Pimski (16), lsend (6), MojoPoop (6), Dullahan (5), Valguris (4), Airus (3), fpsbossfight (3), zxc (3), Destravous (2), Owlsley (2), Raine (2), and all of the following players with one win each: atomfullerene, bugsniper, DDarkray, Demdiran, GridBugBear, happylisk, Joshua, Kyzrati, Nikola Kolodziejczyk, nuzcraft, Terminus, Wad67, wilk.

After GJ reigned supreme for a number of releases, in Beta 4 one of our newer players Valguris topped the leaderboards with a score of 103,974, a mostly hover-based 10-hour combat run through 30 different maps. fpsbossfight wasn't far behind (96,177) with his 28-map 5-hour heavy combat run. The other three Top 5 wins were all players competing over pacifist speed runs, Pimski escaping in only 888 turns, followed by zxc (1,003) and lsend (1,123).

As expected, the average score has started to rebound after dropping significantly with the surge of new players. It's now up 19.1% to 5,364, although still a fair bit lower than pre-Steam levels.

The difficulty mode spread remains little changed from before:
  Mode       Players
  Default    93.1%
  Easier     3.7%
  Easiest    3.2%

Of the seven endings, only the final and most difficult two had no recorded wins, because the few players capable of achieving these endings were mostly on break for Beta 4.

To serve as a comparison for the next release in which imprinting has been significantly modified, let's record the current state of things:

• Cogmind was imprinted in 7.5% of runs, and in most cases (74% of the time) where players had the chance they chose to imprint.
• 37.5% of winning runs were imprinted, with 7 winners (10.7%) choosing not to imprint.
• Players called for dispatches 368 times (average 2.27 per imprinted run), 78.5% reinforcements (21.5% resupply).
• Intel was retrieved 138 times (average 0.85 per imprinted run).
• Both dispatch and intel data shows a relatively even distribution in terms of type, mainly because not everything is always available and Cogmind is forced to choose from less desirable options over the course of a run. The low average values can be attributed to the portion of players who either succumb to the dangers of the return trip, or are destroyed before long in the mid game.

Including anonymous score sheets, in the four weeks of Beta 4 players...

• evolved 16,538 times
• explored 41,971 maps
• recovered 6,614 Derelict logs
• searched 10,202 piles of scrap
• kicked 4,777 robots
• crushed 989 robots
• fired 1,068,440 volleys
• inflicted 33,209,009 damage
• destroyed 411,924 robots
• absorbed 476,396 damage via shields
• entered 367 Garrisons
• disabled 279 Relays
• destroyed 40 Network Hubs
• carried out 10,423 sneak attacks
• intercepted 10,076 Haulers
• created 14,737,924 salvage
• attached 477,428 parts
• used 486 pieces of alien tech
• hacked 71,823 machines
• entered 31,354 hacks manually
• used 13,151 unauthorized hacks
• hacked 3,395 robots
• built 500 robots
• fabricated 1,392 parts
• took 17,829,131 actions
• passed 22,848,511 turns
• earned 26,693,647 points

"Best States" record holders (for select stats) from Beta 4 (excludes anonymous players):

          Heat Dissipation  287 (Terminus)
         Coolant Potential  320 (TurtleHat)
         Energy Generation  122 (Valguris)
           Energy Capacity  4,580 (josiah)
             Matter Stores  1,696 (fpsbossfight)
           Matter Capacity  1,800 (fpsbossfight)
        Terrain Scan Range  30 (GridBugBear, Pimski, s0lid, Terminus)
      Terrain Scan Density  2,110 (sim)
              ECM Strength  12 (Eb)
       Power Amplification  90 (lsend)
   Additional Mass Support  30 (Barbarossa)
     Corruption Prevention  40 (nuzcraft)
            Resistance: TH  75 (Airus)
      Point Defense Rating  320 (josiah)
            Weapon Cycling  50 (Deemzul, fpsbossfight, GridBugBear, s0lid)
         Melee Speed Boost  50 (AlmondRoll, Draxis, Raine)
               Evasion (%)  108 (Pimski)
        Targeting Accuracy  56 (Lt Dan)
            Melee Accuracy  38 (Terminus)
         Launcher Accuracy  70 (s0lid)
          Recoil Reduction  15 (josiah)
               Force Boost  5 (Destravous, Pimski)
         Salvage Targeting  9 (Terminus)
         Offensive Hacking  148 (Terminus)
         Defensive Hacking  73 (Terminus)

Other personal single-run records that stand out among the others:

• Valguris used the most alien tech, 20 pieces in all.
• Pimski earned the most bonus points in a single run: 70,111
• Terminus reached 79% corruption before dying in Research.
• RustyCougarMama and wilk both evolved 5 power slots. More power to them.
• Pimski had more propulsion slots than anyone else, 15, during a speed run win.
• bobduude and NomnNomn both had the most weapon slots: 7
• Valguris had the highest peak rating, at 231.
• lsend, Pimski, Raine, and zxc all earned the maximum pacifist bonus (10,869).
• Pimski earned the maximum pacifist bonus on 4 separate runs.
• fpsbossfight earned 17,417 bonus points for high alert combat kills.
• Joshua earned 5,127 bonus points for follower combat kills.
• MojoPoop entered the most garrisons: 4
• Valguris destroyed 4 Network Hubs on all of three runs.
• Sherlockkat lost the most points to friendly fire: -6,897
• fpsbossfight destroyed 29 different classes of robot.
• fpsbossfight felled 7 Behemoths.
• Valguris obliterated the Fortress on default difficulty.
• Valguris killed 4 major NPCs.
• Pimski and Valguris had the longest kill streak of combat bots: 36
• fpsbossfight collected 33,698 matter.
• Terminus lost the most parts: 311
• Pimski survived 1,091 turns while naked.
• Pimski had the highest average speed: 384%
• Destravous made 639 overloaded moves.
• GridBugBear rammed 72 bots.
• sim kicked 35 bots.
• Krinok and Raine each crushed 8 bots.
• Valguris had the heaviest build, 314, and greatest mass support: 600
• fpsbossfight and Valguris tied for largest inventory capacity, 38, though only fpsbossfight carried up to 34 spare parts.
• Sherlockkat carried an average of 19 parts throughout a run.
• Terminus took 54,185 damage.
• Terminus fired 1,978 volleys.
• Valguris absorbed 8,006 damage with shields.
• mindreader fired the hottest volley: 770
• fpsbossfight fired 5,604 shots.
• josiah fired 461 launcher shots.
• Kyzrati set the gunslinging record with 104 secondary targets (totally won that run).
• bugsniper fired 36 overloaded shots.
• Valguris executed 625 melee attacks.
• zorser sneak attacked 130 robots.
• AlmondRoll had the most multiwielding followup melee attacks: 112
• Valguris dealt 1,417 overflow damage.
• Marbot reached a temperature of 2,223.
• Valguris purged the most corruption: 61
• Valguris intercepted 49 Haulers.
• fpsbossfight corrupted 217 robots.
• josiah triggered 61 power chain reactions.
• neutral jammed communications 21 times.
• bugsniper launched 28 drones
• Valguris recovered 10 drones.
• DDarkray reprogrammed 47 traps.
• Draxis triggered 43 traps.
• Valguris hacked 621 machines, performed 280 manual hacks, and installed 142 Trojans.
• A Legendary Sword overloaded 4 Fabricators.
• Vissk built 10 robots.
• Terminus built 18 parts.
• TurtleHat repaired 10 parts.
• Valguris rewired 32 robots.
• Airus and Joshua tied for the most allies: 93, though Pimski also had the largest group at once (29).
• Valguris triggered high security 4 times in two separate runs, and still won both.
• Pimski (once again) visited the most regions: 36
• MojoPoop spent the most time in Garrisons (3,212 turns).
• khiro spent the most time in Waste (1,526 turns).

Meta stats:

• 93.6% of players use fullscreen (29.0% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 9.0% use hjkl for movement
• 11.0% prefer ASCII
• 17.3% don't touch the mouse
• 0.9% of players have rebound at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (64.5%), followed by Terminus (16.2%), and X11 (8.1%) (11.2% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (53.5%), with 29.2% of players using something lower, and 17.3% higher

Vi keys, ASCII, and keyboard mode are all decently rebounding (doubling on average) following Cogmind's Steam release as the more hardcore players stick with it long term.

Beta 5 Stat Summary
(Leaderboards have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).)

With the detour to work on the 7DRL (http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/03/polybot-7-2018-7drl/) and huge achievements release (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1125.0), we've accumulated quite a few Beta 5 score sheets in the meantime!

12,535 score sheets were uploaded from late January to early this month, 10,261 (81.9%) with a score high enough (>=500) to be included in the stats. 6,027 (58.7%) of those were anonymous so stats below focus on the 4,234 runs by named players except where indicated. There were 569 unique players in Beta 5.

There were 206 wins by Pimski (29), lsend (16), Joshua (15), Leebears (15), Owlsley (13), GJ (12), Valguris (12), Malth (10), fpsbossfight (9), Laida (8), GridBugBear (7), Terminus (7), PlasticHeart (6), Lt. Dan (5), Mojopoop (5), Sherlockkat (5), Ape (3), bugsniper (3), FluffyCat (3), wilk (3), ario (2), MTF (2), zxc (2), and all of the following players with one win each: b_sen, Bruh, Doctor, Dullahan, GDFKTT, Jazzer, mindreader, MSK Impostr, neutral, nuzcraft, RNGesus, Vissk, Xavius.

The fairly high win rate came as a result of quite a few players becoming experienced enough to reliably win (:D), while several others shared their first ever Cogmind win during Beta 5.

By type, the basic w0 was the most common, accounting for more than half (126, 61.2%) of all wins. The other more easily discovered win types (w1/w2/w3) had more winners (11/41/16, respectively) than the very challenging and elusive w4/w5/w6 (2/3/7).

Four players broke the 100k score barrier this release, all of them ending with mostly hover combat builds and fighting into the extended end game. Valguris led with a steep 166,008, followed by Terminus (132,541) who didn't quite make it out in one piece, GJ (119,799), and fpsbossfight (104,848). A lot of the other 50k+ leaderboard runs were also combat-focused this time around, more than usual considering we have so many long-time players normally dedicated to flight strategies.

Average score rose again, adding 31.9% since Beta 4 to reach 7,076. Lots of newer players who joined us after the Steam release are clearly getting better.

Once again we have about the same distribution among difficulty modes (which I'll stop reporting on in the future):
  Mode       Players
  Default    94.1%
  Easier     2.2%
  Easiest    3.7%

Last time (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=205.msg7158#msg7158) I recorded a number of imprinting-related stats with the intent of comparing them to Beta 5 since that was one area that saw significant adjustments and new features (see release notes (http://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1015.0) for more info). Here is an update on what changed, or didn't:

• Cogmind was imprinted in 9.1% of runs, and in most cases (60.6% of the time) where players had the chance they chose to imprint. This was not too different from last time, although the 60% value is down from 74%, partially because 20% of the time players instead opted to do something in Zion which precludes imprinting (a spoilery strategy that became more popular during Beta 5).
• 28.6% of winning runs were imprinted, with 52 winners (46.8%) choosing not to imprint. Overall this was much less imprinting than before, most likely due to that changes making it less ideal for hackers to imprint. It remains a powerful strategy for combat or hybrid builds (as originally intended), but is no longer a free power boost for other types of builds.
• Players called for dispatches 2,356 times (average 6.2 per imprinted run), 70.7% reinforcements (29.3% resupply).
  Despite imprinting less, those who did so made far more use of it! While the reinforcement:resupply ratio was little changed, the average number of dispatches per imprinted run tripled, likely because one of the major new attractions in Beta 5 was the new category of, um... friends.
• Intel was retrieved 3,056 times (average 8.0 per imprinted run). The increase here was even greater than the reinforcements, up by a factor of eight! As of Beta 5 imprinting makes regular Terminal hacking impossible, so players needed to rely on extra intel to fill the infowar gap.

"Best States" record holders (for select stats) from Beta 5:

          Heat Dissipation  292 (MTF)
         Coolant Potential  580 (Ann)
         Energy Generation  170 (Valguris)
           Energy Capacity  5,740 (Valguris)
             Matter Stores  1,232 (Vogel)
      Terrain Scan Density  2,210 (PlasticHeart, Pimski)
              ECM Strength  6 (Avendir, Dullahan, Horse)
       Power Amplification  160 (Valguris)
   Additional Mass Support  36 (GJ)
     Corruption Prevention  24 (Doctor, Grunt, Molten Bear)
            Armor Coverage  2,850 (GJ)
      Point Defense Rating  800 (GJ)
               Evasion (%)  111 (Pimski)
        Targeting Accuracy  64 (Pimski)
            Melee Accuracy  66 (Pimski)
         Launcher Accuracy  120 (ario)
          Recoil Reduction  14 (mindreader)
         Particle Charging  50 (Malth, Terminus)
               Force Boost  8 (AlmondRoll)
         Salvage Targeting  6 (Leebears)
         Offensive Hacking  300 (GJ)
         Defensive Hacking  300 (GJ)

Other personal single-run records that stand out among the others:

• GJ used the most alien tech, 19 pieces in all.
• Valguris earned the most bonus points in a single run: 95,109
• Sherlockkat reached 100% corruption and died in in the extended game.
• Pimski and mindreader had more propulsion slots than anyone else, 20.
• Kyzrati reached the end with the most weapon slots: 8
• Jazzer and Leebears used the most wheels at once, 5.
• GJ had the highest peak rating, at 275.
• Pimski earned the highest pacifist bonus (12,004).
• Valguris earned 43,069 bonus points for high alert combat kills.
• MojoPoop earned 7,784 bonus points for follower combat kills.
• Pimski entered the most garrisons: 23
• Valguris and GridBugBear destroyed 4 Network Hubs.
• Pimski earned the highest win speed bonus: 65,530
• GJ lost the most points to friendly fire: -21,519
• Valguris destroyed 37 different classes of robot.
• kiedra eliminated 127 Programmers.
• GJ felled 9 Behemoths.
• fpsbossfight and Valguris executed 13 Executioners.
• fpsbossfight downed 5 Alpha 7s.
• Jazzer and Valguris murdered 48 Zionites.
• Valguris killed 12 major NPCs.
• GJ obliterated nearly 200 robots in a single turn.
• kiedra collected 44,347 matter.
• Leebears attached the most parts: 1,137
• Pimski won while attaching the least number of parts: 33.
• Malth and Pimski tied for highest average speed: 569%
• GJ made 3,707 overloaded moves.
• GJ rammed 152 bots.
• GJ kicked 149 bots.
• Leebears crushed 15 bots.
• Valguris had the heaviest build at 350.
• GJ and Valguris both carried an average of 27 spare parts throughout a run.
• Terminus absorbed 21,452 damage with shields.
• GJ fired 3,407 volleys.
• ApolliniaD fired the largest volley: 8 weapons.
• Alexbot fired the hottest volley: 740
• kiedra fired 8,858 shots.
• GJ fired 412 launcher shots.
• kiedra set the gunslinging record with 96 secondary targets.
• Taraityg chained together the most gunsling targets at once: 3
• kiedra killed the most bots with critical hits: 322
• may2ever fired 114 overloaded shots.
• Raine executed 1,944 melee attacks.
• Raine sneak attacked 234 robots.
• Raine had the most multiwielding followup melee attacks: 339
• Valguris dealt 963 overflow damage.
• Horse reached a temperature of 1,732.
• kiedra purged the most corruption: 101
• kiedra intercepted 70 Haulers.
• Valguris corrupted 402 robots.
• Leebears triggered 59 power chain reactions.
• Vogel jammed communications 33 times.
• bugsniper was simultaneously tracked by 210 hostiles.
• kiedra made 113 tactical retreats.
• GJ launched 54 drones
• ApolliniaD recovered 30 drones.
• Valguris built 240 traps.
• Joshua reprogrammed 26 traps.
• Valguris hacked 218 machines and performed 476 manual hacks.
• fpsbossfight installed 176 Trojans.
• PolymathAspirant overloaded 5 Fabricators.
• Sabazin built 32 robots.
• Pimski built 22 parts.
• redd repaired 15 parts.
• Pimski collected 21 robot analyses.
• Terminus rewired 34 robots.
• quetzalcoatl hacked 70 robots.
• PlasticHeart assimilated 36 robots.
• GJ had 204 allies across an entire run.
• MTF had 44 allies at once.
• GJ spent 42% of a run at Alert Level 5.
• Pimski (once again) visited the most regions: 85 (this time via garrison looping in Access)
• Lt Dan spent the most time in Garrisons (3,669 turns).
• Valguris spent the most time in Waste (1,837 turns).

Meta stats:

• 91.4% of players use fullscreen (23.8% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 6.2% use hjkl for movement
• 11.8% prefer ASCII
• 19.2% don't touch the mouse
• 1.1% of players have rebound at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (67.1%), followed by Terminus (17.1%), and X11 (8.1%) (7.7% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (54.8%), with 32.5% of players using something lower, and 12.7% higher

Vi key usage fell significantly as a wider variety of players from outside the genre discovered Cogmind this year. ASCII use has remained fairly steady, however, and there are slightly more keyboard mode players now.

Note that due to new regulations in the EU (https://www.eugdpr.org/), as of Beta 6 anonymous scores are no longer uploaded at all, and score uploading is opt-in only (as it was prior to the Steam release), so we'll have a little less data to go on than before, but no matter, we've gotten a glimpse of the anonymous situation and there's not a whole lot of interesting or unexpected information there anyway. We're mostly interested in the stats provided by regular players contributing to the leaderboards :)

Despite the drop in total data, more part-time players will probably be active for Beta 6 now that we have achievements to go for! That'll be the big thing to examine next time.

Beta 6 Stat Summary
(Leaderboards have been reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).)

Beta 6 was a big release since it added the 256-achievement system (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/05/achievements/), and it also took us quite a while to hit Beta 7 due to the huge new robot hacking system (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/07/robot-hacking-take-2/), so that means 6 was out there for quite a while to give us... more data!

However, remember that due to the GDPR changes in May, score uploads were switched to opt-in only so we no longer get any anonymous data, bringing us back to the way it was before last year prior to Steam. That's fine with me, although it means what we're seeing here now only represents a subset of the player base. As for the portion of players we do have here, based on old data I'd say it's at least half.

Against that background, let's dive in...

[For a while now I've kinda had a formula going for these stat analysis posts, but I won't be following that so closely this time.]

In the four months (!) of Beta 6, 5,619 score sheets were uploaded, of which 4,811 (85.6%) had a score high enough (>= 500) to be included in the stats. 529 unique named players submitted at least one run, averaging 9.1 qualified runs per player.

Altogether Beta 6 saw a stunning 462 wins (an 8.2% win rate!) by Valguris (81), Mhorre (38), Malthusis (30), lsend (27), Raine (26), Terminus (22), wilk (22), Pimski (19), zxc (19), GJ (16), PlasticHeart (15), Main.Cuck (12), GridBugBear (11), MojoPoop (11), Decinym (9), PhenomPhear (9), GOR (8), Zyalin (8), Joshua (7), Palikka (7), Ape (4), Ben'n'Dan (4), FluffyCat (4), Airus (3), Amphouse (3), bugsniper (3), Kyzrati (3), Rumbl3 (3), Alexbot (2), DDarkray (2), fpsbossfight (2), James Vagabond (2), Maugrift (2), Owlsley (2), Quelan (2), Sabazin (2), SNACKS (2), and all of the following players with one win each: b_sen, Benjamin, Donnie, Finestep, Leebears, LuckyLuckLuc, MajesticThrust, Misery, Mitaro, nameofteam, nuzcraft, Phantom, RBrandon, RNGesus, Tapuck, TheMulletron, VapourLock, Xifax, and Zinc. (Note that most of these players hang out on our Discord (https://discord.gg/9pmFGKx), so stop by if you're looking for advice :D)

Even factoring in the community's increasing collective skill, those are some pretty high numbers, especially those topping the list. One clear factor is the popularity of turn-based speedrunning as an alternative way to play Cogmind, and a lot of the speedrunners are quite good so it's not really a matter of whether they'll win, just how long it'll take. Assuming wins below 3,000 turns are probably speedruns, they account for half (49.4%!) of all wins. This makes sense because speedrun wins are pretty quick to knock out compared to regular runs.

(https://i.imgur.com/3HsngGp.png)

I got in a speedrun win myself, unfortunately just outside of 2,000 turns (though only my second try :D). I remember when I used to be able to reliably hang out in or near the top 10 on the leaderboards, but now my usual runs aren't even in the top 30 anymore! There are more players, and more players are getting better. Beta 6 leaderboards can be found in the archives (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-180508-180904.html), including all Beta 6 score sheets linked at the bottom.

Achievements being the big thing in Beta 6 (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1125.0), we should definitely take a look at those.

Except for the few which were bugged and only just recently fixed for Beta 7, at this point every achievement has been earned.
although no single player has earned all achievements yet. The highest achievement rates so far:
           Player  Achievement Rate
               GJ  89%
         Valguris  79%
            Raine  73%
      PhenomPhear  72%
         Terminus  71%

Note that we can't take a close look at specific achievement numbers because unfortunately Steam does not display accurate rates. The data you see on their site is rounded, and Cogmind has so many challenging achievements compared to the number of frequent players that a bunch of achievement numbers simply round to zero. They've all been earned by at least someone though.

Among the rarest achievements are some of the win types, since there are so many different ways to win and not many of the associated achievements can be earned simultaneously. Really a good number of achievements in general are mutually exclusive, so truly covering the full range is a matter of doing enough runs while aiming for these different achievements--using different play styles, taking different routes through the world, engaging with different challenges and plot points...

That's not to say you can't earn a lot of achievements in a single run. The top achievement-earning runs:
           Player  Most Achievements in a Single Run
         Valguris  124
              zxc  95
           Pimski  93
            lsend  76
            Airus  74

124 is nearly half of Cogmind's achievements in a single run! Of course, that was as 15-hour combat run that hit a crazy amount of content...

In total players earned 135,575 achievements during Beta 6, averaging 28.2 per run.

We also had a bunch of score sheet entries added specifically as part of the achievements update to help record information required to award them, so we could check out some of those as well...

• 195 Cogminds were scanned by Researchers, which can be a dangerous thing to have happen, but some players either don't mind or even (!) do it intentionally. 60 winning runs were scanned.
• 0.8% of matter was collected remotely, the same ratio among both wins and non-winning runs.
• 28,856 unidentified prototypes were attached, about 6 per run. Terminus attached the most in a single run (120).
• 917,801 spaces were dug, 69,045 (7.5%) via melee. Certainly the majority of terrain was destroyed by AOE weapons, but melee digging must be explicit so that high a percentage is telling of the value of melee digging as an effective strategy.
• 14,174 Recyclers were shooed. McSi wins the award for being the most annoyed, having shooed 47 Recyclers in a single run.
• 29 machines were destroyed in a single turn by PhenomPhear. Boom.
• 22,027 unidentified exits were taken, an average of 4.58 per run. GJ took the most in a single run: 24

Meta stats:

• 91.5% of players use fullscreen (25.8% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 6.6% use hjkl for movement
• 11.7% prefer ASCII
• 23.3% don't touch the mouse
• 0.9% of players have rebinded at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (63.5%), followed by Terminus (18.7%), and X11 (8.7%) (9.1% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (55.0%), with 30.1% of players using something lower, and 14.9% higher

There were almost no changes to the meta stats since Beta 5, aside from a noticeable increase in the number of keyboard players and the portion of those selecting the Terminus font somewhat rose against Smallcaps.

This time around we also got a new meta stat to look at: Tactical HUD use. 73.2% of players have activated that feature. Anecdotally some players prefer having somewhat fewer numbers and less clutter on the interface, although a majority of those players using the regular HUD probably either didn't play much yet or haven't noticed it in the options. If you aren't using the Tactical HUD yet, you'll most likely want to do that once you're familiar with most of the mechanics since it gives extra useful information (but can be confusing and distracting when you first start out, hence it's off by default).

In terms of purely aesthetic preferences, only 2.1% of players use a render filter, unchanged from Beta 5 (but I forgot to cover that last time, when that feature  was first introduced). The few who use it are generally turning on low-contrast mode.

Next time we'll get to take a look at the robot hacking system introduced for Beta 7 (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1212.0), among other new stats added to the score sheet.

Beta 7 Stat Summary
(As usual, leaderboards were reset (http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) with the new release. The full archived Beta 7 leaderboards can be found here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-180904-190212.html), with score sheets for all runs accessible at the bottom.)

Time to look at non-anonymous player data! Like Beta 6 this was an especially long cycle, spanning months of Beta 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.2LE as I also took time out to do some other dev things, so we now have 6,145 score sheets to go through... Well, technically we're only looking at 5,208 (87.3%) of those since the rest scored below the 500-point threshold, a similar ratio to what we've seen before.

606 unique named players are included this time, a 14.6% increase compared to Beta 6. That's 11.6 qualified runs per player, a 27.4% increase.

The Beta 7 win rate was actually significantly lower at 6.6% (down from 8.2%), primarily because speedrunning was a big thing in the last release, but not so much this time. For Beta 6 I graphed (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=205.msg8096#msg8096) the wins by turn count and found that about half of all wins were speed runs, so technically excluding those our win rate has actually increased somewhat. There were 344 wins in all by

Valguris (126), MTF (17), Zyalin (15), lsend (14), GJ (12), PlasticHeart (11), kiedra (10), Raine (10), Pimski (9), Tone (8), wilk (8), Decinym (6), Terminus (6), whitenitro0 (5), badjay (4), Main.Cuck (4), Malth (4), cptwinky (3), GridBugBear (3), JackNine (3), Kyzrati (3), Mhorre (3), octapi (3), Omewes (3), Puzzlebark (3), tiniclx (3), UlyssesB (3), Ape (2), IceBox (2), JakeThyCamel (2), MojoPoop (2), Owlsley (2), PhenomPhear (2), Rumbl3 (2), Aeon2927, Alexbot, Amphouse, bugsniper, ConfusingDalek, Cowmind, FIRE_C4T, GOR, Heavyrisk, Howard, JC, Joel, joke_LA, McSi, moonshine, NoNeedToExplain, physalin, Quelan, RNGesus, Sherlockkat, slh, Some Random Guy, SpiritFryer, SSMR, TBExtent, tournTrione, zidji, Zinc, zxc.

Once again Valguris racks up an insane number of wins xD

And of special note, Pimski earned Cogmind's second highest ever score (241,581!) using so-called "Garrison looping," repeatedly traveling through garrisons and destroying their contents, returning to the main floor. There was only one place in the world where this was possible, and it also involved the most challenging garrisons, but through a combination of speed and guided weaponry, Pimski managed to take out 44 of them xD. As of Beta 8 some of the mechanics involved there have changed so that it's no longer possible, but we're already seeing more regular runs creep up towards 200k regardless... That said, it may never be possible to break the 123 Regions Visited record set by that run.

Last time I graphed wins by turn count, and now that everyone seems to have speedrunning out of their system I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at win distribution by real time:

(https://i.imgur.com/Q5FrZIg.png)

Most of Valguris' runs tend to fall in the 0.5~1.0-hour range, hence the extra high surge there, otherwise it's a fairly even distribution overall. I split out his runs in the graph to give a better representation :P

PlasticHeart has also provided us with what he calls "mutation distribution," graphing what kinds of long-term benefits different winners are using:

(https://i.imgur.com/RKowBLj.png)

As you can see the graph excludes speed runs since they tend to distort data. There's a fairly even distribution here as well, although it's interesting to see that nearly 40% of wins do so with no mutations at all. Of course, getting any of these requires deviating from the main path, sometimes fairly far away, so they aren't the kind of thing you'll just "happen across." The new FarCom (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2019/02/level-design-shaping-cogmind-experience/) introduced for Beta 8 will no doubt be popular. (The current "mutation" data for Beta 8 scores is also available here (http://cogmind.plasticheart.info/beta/8/mutation/), by the way, although there's not yet a way to tell whether anyone's immediately lost FarCom and therefore didn't really take advantage of it.)

The big new thing for Beta 7 was RIF, or robot hacking (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/07/robot-hacking-take-2/), so that's definitely something to explore here.

Obtaining this ability requires entering a Garrison, which isn't too bad if you're prepared, but a lot of people were probably avoiding them before, so I imagine there was a distinct lack of experience... The data bears that out, with 3.6% of losses inside a Garrison, compared to 2.3% in Beta 6.

422 runs (8.1%) acquired RIF, two-thirds of them inside the -8 Garrison, although a fair but smaller number did it in -7, and relatively few later than that. RIF keeps getting improvements, some in the Beta 7 updates, more in Beta 8, and likely yet more in Beta 9, so the style is definitely coming into its own.

The average RIF run hacked only 9 bots, but the highest number hacked was 124 (by Joel). Players tended to hack combat robots a bit more than non-combat bots. The only hacks that went completely unused so far are tweak_propulsion, likely because it's pretty situational and there are generally better options, and report_prototypes, report_schematics, and report_analyses, probably because their results are both uncontrollable and can be achieved through other means anyway, thus Relay Couplers are too valuable to spend on them.

Among RIF runs, only an average 3.27 Relay Couplers were attached, although Joel attached 43 in a single run. And wow, apparently I took the second spot in this category with 41 attached (and the third spot with 24 xD). I did rather like RIF, and streamed (https://youtu.be/VVEW7CkOYDA) a couple runs with it, and plan to do some more, having really barely scratched the surface so far when it comes to robot hacking... 131 (31%!) of RIF users never attached a single Relay Coupler, probably because they were still learning, or unprepared for that Garrison ;)

I've compiled a chart of hacks by the number of times they were used, excluding anything with fewer than 10 uses total:

(https://i.imgur.com/VtP367U.png)

Hacks that can target both combat and non-combat bots are not marked, but some of those are especially popular as well, such as overload_power, a great hack for making a mess. parse_system is popular of course, but it only provides meta information and plot stuff so isn't as meaningful here. That was something which could always be done even before RIF.

formatsys_high is by far the top hack, the good old assimilation hack which is expensive but if you've got the coupler power might as well use it! overwrite_iff is the cheaper temporary version, useful for weakening enemy groups when a newly formatted ally would end up just dying anyway.

I'd like to compare this data to what we get from Beta 8 to see if there are any shifts as players learn more about the different hacks, and perhaps take advantage of RIF more often as it's both been buffed and works well with FarCom.

I was curious about gunslinging stats since Beta 7 made that guaranteed, plus more players might want to take advantage of it as a result. Sure enough, the average amount of gunslinging doubled in Beta 7, increasing from an average 1.68 secondary targets to 3.03. (I did a gunslinging run (https://youtu.be/mWLYK6almG8) myself.) kiedra led the pack with a whopping 104 secondary targets in a single run. By comparison my own gunslinger run only had 29, but that's still pretty high ;)

Melee secondary attacks were also buffed, and while they weren't recorded in Beta 6 so we can't compare, according to Beta 7 data there were an average of only 0.51 per run. That's fairly low, but then most people prefer taking on targets one-on-one with their melee builds. That said, PhenomPhear had a run with 32 (!) secondary melee attacks. To be clear, this is attacking more than one robot with a single melee volley.

Comparable data that we do have for Beta 6 includes follow-up attacks, i.e. hitting a single target with more than one melee weapon. There was a definite surge there, where the average run went from 0.90 follow-up attacks to 2.00. The averages in all these are rather low since many don't use this mechanic at all, but it's extremely effective. Back in Beta 6 the follow-up record in a single run was 284, but that was topped in Beta 7 by GJ with 527! That's quite a beat-down...

Meta stats:

• 89.9% of players use fullscreen (30.9% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 7.3% use hjkl for movement
• 12.8% prefer ASCII
• 21.8% don't touch the mouse
• 1.5% of players have rebinded at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (65.9%), followed by Terminus (16.2%), and X11 (7.8%) (10.1% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (53.8%), with 28.4% of players using something lower, and 17.8% higher
• 1.5% percent of players are using a render filter, fewer than in Beta 6. Most of those are activating low-contrast mode.
• 72.6% of players are using Tactical HUD mode

Beta 8 Stat Summary

It's the end of an age! This is the final stat summary based on the system we've had in place for past several years, as we migrate to the new database-driven system from Beta 9 onwards. That system is not yet available, and I'm not sure how the future stat analysis will be handled, but the data is being uploaded (assuming you've opted in via the options menu) and in the meantime you can already explore the online data for your own runs via the URLs appended to your scoresheets.

The full archived Beta 8 leaderboards can be found here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-190212-191022.html), with scoresheets for all runs accessible at the bottom.

For Beta 8 we have a total 7,225 runs that made the 500-point threshold (86.2% of a total 8,381 runs).

Sadly there was a server issue in June (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1333.0) leading to about 10 days in June during which scoresheets could not be uploaded, and I estimate we likely lost approximately 300 non-anonymous submissions. And although the main problem was eventually fixed, in the subsequent months a number of scoresheets failed upload for some reason and we couldn't figure out why or even precisely what, only much later discovering that it seemed to be some of the +/++ extended run wins that were failing, and some others as well for unknown reasons. So although this leaderboard's share of run data is quite large because the 8/8.1/8.2 period lasted quite a while, let it be noted that we're unfortunately missing about 4% of the runs, including some wins. (As per my announcements regarding this issue, however, some players proactively provided me with their scoresheets for inclusion, so some of them were recovered and added retroactively.)

699 unique named players submitted at least one qualifying Beta 8 run, or 10.3 per player, an 11.2% decrease from Beta 8, although Beta 8 itself was a significant jump from 7.

Beta 8's win rate continued on a downward trend, from 8.2% in Beta 6 to 6.6% in Beta 7 to the latest 4.9%. This is due to the number of new players remaining steady whereas a lot of the old guard capable of reliably winning runs taking a break during the unusually long Beta 8 cycle (also back in Beta 7 they were speedrunning, which leads to far more deaths :P).

354 wins were submitted by alice_fexa (28), 3.14 (25), Pimski (15), Trione (12), Naughtyusername (12), Dullahan (12), lsend (11), Alexbot (10), Terminus (9) PlasticHeart (9), Mitaro (9), Horse (8), Valguris (8), cptwinky (8), Xii (7), Main.E (7), Solar Sloth (7), MTF (7), Leebears (6) muxecoid (5), whitenitro0 (5), Palikka (5), Fod (5), Zyalin (5), Gaidara (4), Owlsley (4), Howard (4), Joshua (4), TBExtent (4),Quelan (4), Raine (4), Torako (3), JSLIN (3), eldritch (3), Puzzlebark (3), Malth (3). There were (2) wins each by TheBestTreadsBuild, SNACKS, fpsbossfight, Cheeriohz, Styles, Kyzrati, inSANE, zzxc, Rumbl3, octapi,Sorctek, AlmondRoll, Sylvia, eb, tiniuclx, JC, aoemica, Amphouse, and (1) by Benjamin, MojoPoop, mat, Daniexpert, TheEpicPerson, Nikola Kolodziejczyk, IAMCRAIG, Nikolayag, Cracklepappy, cinereoux GridBugBear, Omewes, Tone, l.n.c.a., Vect, ConfusingDalek, Mutter, PerrySimm, SSMR, JackNine, Suslik, Cookie, Gobbopathe, Maiker Moran, QudTheCat, ctrl_alt_x, Cowmind, happylisk, BCN, Bert, RNGesus, Wayward Satellite, KirdTheApe, wilk, 277, d4void, Gitida,Finestep, Marcus Aseth.

alice_fexa took the lead this time in total win count, and Pimski once again broke Cogmind's high score record with a whopping 355,452.

PlasticHeart's "winners mutation distribution" graph is back, growing increasingly complicated as yet more combinations are possible due to new strategic options:

(https://i.imgur.com/0dFxQiN.png)

According to this, two-thirds (63.8%) of winners obtained access to FarCom (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2019/02/level-design-shaping-cogmind-experience/), one of Beta 8's big new features, although 11.3% of those definitely stole prototypes from the Exiles and later had their access rescinded. An additional greater number no doubt also lost access, unknown because the old scoresheets didn't include any explicit indication of stolen prototypes (we'll have that data for Beta 9), so the true number of runs actually using FarCom throughout might be half or less.

I've been curious about the total number of runs by individual players, something we haven't looked at before, so I put together that data for Beta 8:

(https://i.imgur.com/pmUtt7R.png)

A little more than half played only one or maybe a few runs, those who generally just try out what's new in the latest Early Access release then go back to whatever else they were playing, with the second largest category being the core group of players, many who keep coming back for more and do quite a few runs aiming for not only the latest content but also extra achievements and lore. At the highest end are some pretty crazy figures!

The top three run counts by individuals:
  3.14              405
  alice_fexa        343
  Naughtyusername   225

Alongside the run counts I also tallied the average number of evolutions by all the runs in a given category, showing that the players who did more runs also performed better on average.

But the averages were only so telling so I thought it'd be even more interesting to look at the single best run from each player and average only those runs, finding a much clearer disparity between the groups, and a clearer connection between number of runs and how far players are capable of reaching. (Of course depending on the player and their style that could also be attributed to sheer luck in some cases, though I don't think that accounts for the majority of the difference, based on relative scores.)

Exiles

Beta 8 added the first new map in a while, so of course a lot of players are going to be interested in visting it, especially considering it's in the early game. Almost one-third (31.6%) of runs (2,285) visited the Exiles in their lab, which is quite a lot! It's near the beginning so not too hard to reach, although getting there does require passing through the Mines, which is where 9.7% of runs ended this time around. This is up from 5.2% in Beta 7, when the Mines only had their other regular benefits rather than being a route to the EX-prototypes and their FarCom system. (Note that leaving the Exiles lab forces players to pass through a second Mines area as well, which is yet another chance to die there.)

Funnily even 2.7% of runs ended in Exiles itself! This seems like it should be more rare because it's a friendly map and although dangerous things can happen there, you're protected from them, but this value comes mostly from players who are intentionally attacking them which doesn't always go so well considering how powerful they are relative to how weak Cogmind is at the start. Still, by now it's clear that if there's a potential benefit to be had by being evil, a portion of players are going to do whatever it takes to get it :P

Trackers/DC

In other branch activity, I was curious how the addition of a new deadly enemy, Trackers, affected the number of people using "DC" compared to before. Of the runs that routed through the necessary map, 17.6 used DC in Beta 7, compared to a much smaller 10.1% in Beta 8. Admittedly this doesn't capture the portion people who didn't visit the necessary map in the first place specifically because they didn't intend to do this, but that portion won't be too significant because there are great benefits to be had there even without "DC". The shift could also be attributed to a factor mentioned earlier, the old guard (more likely to use this strategy) playing less of Beta 8 while a greater number of newer players don't even know the feature exists, but we also have anecdotal evidence from the community that suggests this strategy is being relied on less often as a result of its new consequences.

RIF

Strategically speaking FarCom actually goes pretty well with RIF (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2018/07/robot-hacking-take-2/), which was just introduced in Beta 7, so it might be worth taking a look at if/how RIF usage changed.

687 runs (9.5%) entered at least one Garrison, and 194 (2.7%) died inside one, down from the 3.6% in Beta 7, meaning either fewer people entered Garrisons since RIF was no longer the New Thing, or those that did got better at tackling Garrison challenges. 436 (6.1%) of runs actually used a RIF Installer, down from the 8.1% of Beta 7, so indeed fewer were likely interested in getting this functionality. (I think this particular data would be somewhat more accurate if we only checked whether each player acquired RIF on any of their runs, but that's more complicated with the set I have so I'm not doing it that way.)

The average RIF run hacked only 9 bots, the same average found as in Beta 7 (split evenly between combat and non-combat targets). aoemica hacked the most in a single run, 146! Among RIF runs an average of 2.87 Relay Couplers were attached in a single run(fewer than the 3.27 in Beta 7), compared to aoemica's 66 couplers on one go! Somewhat surprisingly 171 RIF-capable runs didn't attach a single coupler, an even higher ratio than last release.

I mentioned in the Beta 7 stats that I'd like to see if/how relative bothack usage changed from one release to the next, but it really hasn't shifted much aside from a noticeable rise in find_chute uses as Waste-hunters discover how useful that one is :) (also good for slow bots to use in avoiding an undesirable visit to Crusher land).

HCP

With the Hcp. Storage Unit finally making its way back into Cogmind, I thought it'd be interesting to confirm that it's affecting the average and upper storage capacity. That does pan out in the data...
             Largest    Average     Most      Average
             Inventory  Capacity    Carried   Carried

Beta 7 avg   12.5       9.1         11.3      7.3
Beta 8 avg   15.9       11.3        14.3      9.5

Beta 7 max   60         35          48        34
Beta 8 max   62         41          62        40

Pay2Buy

Not included in the regular stats presented here, we've had a total of 105 Pay2Buy runs uploaded since that mode was introduced in April. The mode is still accessible and as of now a total of 50 unique players have both played the mode and uploaded their data. The leaderboard for the event period is here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/events/P2B2019/), including access to the original announcement and many more event-specific stats. There were 39 players who participated in time to be included for the leaderboard.

Meta

• 91.0% of players use fullscreen (30.4% of those use borderless windowed mode)
• 5.7% use hjkl for movement (41.2% prefer mouse, 11.3% use arrows, 41.8% use numpad)
• 11.0% prefer ASCII
• 21.3% don't touch the mouse
• 1.6% of players have rebinded at least one command
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (67.5%), followed by Terminus (17.0%), and X11 (7.3%) (8.2% use some other font)
• 1080p is the most common resolution (53.8%), with 28.9% of players using something lower, and 17.3% higher
• 1.3% percent of players are using a render filter. Most of those are activating low-contrast mode, followed by brightness tweaks as the second most popular adjustment.
• 72.9% of players are using Tactical HUD mode

The Beta 9 stat summary (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/01/cogmind-beta-9-player-stats/) is finally here! And it's big. Really big. So big that it's on the blog :P

(https://i.imgur.com/jKam9Hf.png) (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/01/cogmind-beta-9-player-stats/)

Beta 10 Stat Summary

Once again a major new Cogmind version (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1577.0) has been released, and that means it's time to look back at some of the stats for the previous version! Beta 11 was the longest ever cycle in Cogmind development history (being the huge overhaul that it was), meaning Beta 10 was active for quite a while and therefore includes a lot of runs, though that release itself was not uniquely interesting from a data perspective considering that much of the work that went into it was of a cosmetic nature, including for example the ambient audioscape and QoL-related features. By comparison I'm sure the future Beta 11 stats will be very interesting when those come out, given how much was changed or added, but that's for next time on the blog. Here we'll be using the older forum-based format to explore some of the usual player stats, as well as of course poking around here and there looking anything that might be relevant to Beta 10 in particular.

As usual the leaderboards have been reset and the full archived Beta 10 leaderboards can be found here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-200915-220318.html), with scoresheets for all runs accessible at the bottom.

For Beta 10 we have a total 14,338 runs that made the 500-point threshold (96.7% of a total 14,820 submitted runs) to be included in the leaderboards and results here. That count includes 12,545 regular runs, which we'll focus on for the purposes of the stats below, as well as 1,793 runs completed under special events or challenge modes, which I'll write a bit about separately.

1,320 unique named players submitted at least one qualifying Beta 10 run, or 10.5 per player, returning to earlier levels after having dipped a bit in Beta 9.

Difficulty

Beta 10 was the second release after adding the difficulty selection menu, so the change in player distribution wasn't as stark as that seen between Betas 8 and 9, though we can still see a bit of a downtick in the portion of players using non-Rogue modes.

(https://i.imgur.com/Ki9QUdd.png)

However, the number of players in all categories increased for Beta 10, so the change in distribution here was at least partially a function of a more hardcore roguelike players joining the community (+60.7% vs. +20.3%/+12.2% for Adventurer/Explorer). There was also likely a smaller number of players gradually shifting out of other settings (especially Adventurer) to play Rogue, having gained more experience and wanting to seek extra challenge.

Wins

The win rate in Beta 10 was 4.1%, a new low down from 5.7% in the previous release (and only slightly below Beta 8), though there's generally too much noise to read into such a broad value. As a better comparison to other releases, for my own purposes I looked at the number of Rogue-level players who won at least one run, mainly to more easily filter out runs where the player was doing weird stuff or not aiming to win, and excluding the other difficulty settings since they can use quicksaves (and aren't what the content is balanced around anyway).

(https://i.imgur.com/Ofv7Ct2.png)

There we see a fairly consistent rate across all releases from the past few years, solidly in the 12~14% range. I imagine the win-one-run rate won't fall too much in Beta 11 (those who can already win will find the new version challenging, but eventually figure out how to deal with the new content), although next time we do these stats I'll be very curious to see if the general win rate falls further, which is likely given that the difficulty of Complex 0b10 itself was increased.

516 wins were submitted by GJ (56), Jezoensis (47), CrossedViper (28), MTF (17), cptwinky (13), Wyvric (11), 3.14 (11), aperiodic (10), Savant (10), Alexbot (9), blelm (9), ChromeKnight (9), derk (9), ktur (9), LU-1G1 (9), Perseus (9), zzxc (9), Phaethon (8), Farfid (7), lsend (7), Palikka (7), thingamajigger (7), alice_fexa (6), Michael (6), Sanctumkeeper (6), cavemonk (5), KTG-V2 (5), leiavoia (5), OR-2NL (5), sentrybuster (5), WayneKnight (5), Exp. Geonium Core (4), Floating Point Exception (4), Pimski (4), the cat (4), Torako (4), Andru7428 (3), Azken Zutik (3), Boris (3), Cookedpoo (3), Demise (3), Finestep (3), Kenzurith (3), kerapace (3), Leebears (3), Mares (3), Tone (3), whisper (3), xerxia (3), youngster (3), Buffy (2), Coronach (2), Cracklepappy (2), Dawn (2), Decinym (2), Hermelin (2), KTG-V3 (2), MoonDog (2), muxecoid (2), Nikolayag (2), NoNeedToExplain (2), Peace (2), pointone (2), rath (2), Saya (2), Terminus (2), Valguris (2), Vectis (2), Xeram (2), and (1) by AF_C2_5001, albenzo, aoemica, Avari3l, buthix9, cinereoux, Cinquain, Cog, Crorem, CV-BEE, DaddyWalrus, darlorth, DEZA, Dhoby_Ghaut, Fleshy Vegetable Bird, FR-35H, gammafunk, Geraldon, Gitida, Gobbopathe, HawkeyeFierce, Hilbert, Howard, Infomantis, JackNine, Joel, Joking_Phantom, Joshua, kasaphescent, Krahie, Kyzrati, malcneuro, Matie Bal, MinorBread, MrPotato28, Nalzok, Needle, PerrySimm, Peter, PlasticHeart, raddakar, ShuSh, SirMrDrProf, soymachine, spruce, StarSirius, Stryker, szymekc, The Phoenix Tome, TheEpicPerson, Tmvn, Trione, Veritas, viper, Yosh, Zailor.

The Return of GJ inevitably means GJ is a strong contender for win count leader, though we also see pretty high numbers from other players, too. Jezoensis began with quite a few Adventurer mode wins before moving on to challenging Rogue mode (and getting some wins there, too), and CrossedViper played a relatively huge number of runs (287!).

Of significant impact when it comes to our stats this time around is that core/OG players are somewhat underrepresented because many among that group are patrons and therefore played Beta 11 prerelease versions throughout the majority of the Beta 10 leaderboard period. For example I first realized this when I noticed aoemica has only a single Beta 10 win on record, but on closer inspection submitted 53 wins while helping test Beta 11 prereleases :D

Among the runs included above, MTF set a new record high Cogmind score of 423,663 (scoresheet (https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/FjLf3qHftm4yrzkjq)) by sterilizing 10 different maps (mostly in the late game) and earning 140,168 of that purely from bonus points for high-alert combat kills, destroying 3,721 robots in all.

Another run of particular note set an even higher record, a whopping 1,012,980-point run by Azken Zutik, excluded from our stats only because it was played under the Gauntlet challenge mode. That run (https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/dpsWJjRCAzEbSgZ5a) spanned a mind-boggling 91 hours, made possible by approaching the challenge as a bothacking/RIF build that led an army capable of protecting Cogmind from almost all attrition, repeatedly visiting Garrisons at the same depth to restock. 370,220 points came from allied kills alone. Even the 582 regions visited resulted in a bonus of 116,400 points, which is just... crazy xD

Very impressive stuff!

While we're on sterilization, that was the new mechanic added for Beta 10 as a sort of final cutoff for destruction, added especially for players otherwise endlessly crushing 0b10 on a single map using easier settings such as RPGLIKE mode or the Explorer difficulty. Only 17 players sterilized any maps at all, across 29 runs, so a pretty small number. The majority of those only sterilized one map, maybe two, aside from MTF's 10-map sterilization run and a 5-map sterilization by NikolayAg. (Since then I also attempted a "sterilization run," but quit after my 4th sterilization going into the late game because I was streaming it and my strategy was taking too long :P)

I'm sure we'll be seeing the frequency go up significantly in Beta 11, if only because this mechanic was further reused in DSFs (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/12/maps-between-maps-and-dsfs/), as well as being much easier to trigger there, and even offering a decently reliable strategy.

Cogmind had seven win types prior to Beta 10, with that release adding two new ones for a total of nine. Both of the new endings and their requirements involve the extended game and are therefore very spoiler-heavy, so I'll put this (small) section behind a spoiler tag:

Extended game alternative ending spoilers...

"w7" (win type 7) is the extended Warlord arc, which allows you to help him infiltrate Command to confront MAIN.C directly. Of course he's awesome so this was high on the list of desirable things to see happen, and I think Warlord in his upgraded form lives up to the hype :)

There were 14 submitted w7's, each by a different player (including the one I did on stream).

w8 requires you to surrender to MAIN.C half way through that fight, and then it doesn't end there since Command comes under attack by another force you need to help fend off, all while protecting MAIN.C.

Only 11 w8's were submitted, again each by a different player (I haven't had a chance to do this one yet, though certainly made it a goal a couple times). Pimski had the fastest win after surrendering, with 478 turns. And the fastest win from start to surrender to win was submitted by lsend, with a 6,179-turn w8, 15.7% (973 turns) of which was spent defending MAIN.C. Both of these were flight builds, but about half of the surrender runs were won with siege mode.

[close]

Of course we saw lots more of these achieved during the Beta 11 prereleases as well.

During Beta 10 I've heard yet more questions about the "length of a winning Cogmind run," something which is often compared across different roguelikes.

We know that it can vary greatly depending on goals and strategy, since Cogmind is designed as a "wide" game rather than being outright long, and you can have anything from 20-minute speed run wins to 10-hour marathons, or the more reasonable/likely/common 100~200-minute runs in between, but let's look at some real data on that for fun...

Again it depends on strategy and goals, so our statistical results are of course skewed by whichever types of players have greater representation. A more accurate approach would be to also look at the build types used here, and the number of optional areas visited, but that's probably not especially helpful beyond the general range we're looking to visualize.

(https://i.imgur.com/GVNC3Ao.png)

This graph is composed of 181 w0/non-extended wins and 335 extended wins, and we can see that the shape of each is similar, with peaks at the lower end and trending downward into longer and longer runs, ending with another spike consisting of outliers doing special runs. Obviously extended runs are going to increase the average somewhat, though it's not an especially huge increase--extended wins averaged 5.4 hours, while others averaged 4.7 hours (the median for each category was 5 and 4 hours, respectively). As expected, a little over half of "standard" (non-extended) wins fall within the 2- to 4-hour range.

Mechanics

Because Beta 10 added six new RIF abilities, I thought it'd be interesting to see whether that had any impact on adoption of that strategy, but a comparison between the last two versions shows there was no meaningful effect (stats only include those runs which reached a depth of at least -6, which was about 44% in both versions):
                                        Beta 9      Beta 10
Used only 1 RIF Installer               6.0%        6.4%
Used 2 or more RIF Installers           9.1%        8.2%
RIF builds hacked at least 3 robots     65.9%       61.0%

However, the top 100 RIF runs by bot hacks applied increased pretty significantly, up from a median of 89 hacks in Beta 9, to 117 in Beta 10. So RIF builds are riffing harder. The median number of RIF Installers used in those runs was 7 in Beta 9, vs. 8 in Beta 10.

I also took a quick look at the most common primary classes used across a run, but didn't see any significant changes between the in-depth Beta 9 analysis and more recent Beta 10 runs. We'll almost certainly see more changes there headed into Beta 11, now that the "Hauler" concept has been refedined, so we'll look at those again then. This time around there were 76 unique build combinations (out of a theoretical maximum of 208), as opposed to the 67 from Beta 9.

Special Events

Beta 10 included some special events, as with previous versions (Beta 9 was especially prolific in this regard--see stats (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/01/cogmind-beta-9-player-stats/)), though not quite on the same scale. The big one was the lore-centric ARG (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1488.0), and we also had a quick AFD mode called "Volatile" which wasn't even explicitly announced, so I imagine not as many people even actually played that one. Of course players are also still able to go back and play most prior events if they want to, and some do that, especially with RPGLIKE mode, for example. So let's take a look at what was played, and how much...

249 unique players (17.6%) played at least one special event run, with 74% of them playing more than one run. There were 1,746 special event runs in all (13.89% of all runs).

(https://i.imgur.com/YC8prEc.png)

Sure enough, not many actually tried out Volatile mode, it being both unannounced and pretty short in duration. Another thing you'll notice is the much higher win rate under RPGLIKE, not exactly a surprise since it adds a healing mechanic which overall makes Cogmind an easier game. And of course the dominant event of the version was Forbidden Lore, being the major one held during Beta 10, and also requiring multiple runs to fully explore its content. That requirement was somewhat offset by the community working together in some cases, but it was still a run-heavy mode due to the drip of puzzles and metaknowledge it would offer with each run. Forbidden Lore also had a lower win rate since more players would be likely to simply self-destruct once they had what they were after, if it looked like their next clue was in a place they could no longer feasibly reach on their current run.

As part of my articles on design of the Beta 11.2 "Polymind (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1641.0)" event/special mode from late last year, I analyzed a bunch of relevant stats you can check out over there: Special Mode Design, Polymind Part 2: Players, Stats, and the Future (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2023/02/special-mode-design-polymind-part-2-players-stats-and-the-future/).

(https://i.imgur.com/YOjUkZg.png)

Big move from Beta 10 to Beta 11, calling for a big stat article filled with graphs, charts, and numbers (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2023/03/cogmind-beta-11-player-stats/) :)

(https://i.imgur.com/1genk00.png)

Beta 12 Stat Summary

Beta 13 (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1709.0) is out, leaderboards (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/) have been reset, time to examine some stats from the previous version! Our last huge stat review was done after Beta 11, in 2023 here on the blog (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2023/03/cogmind-beta-11-player-stats/), and that being an important milestone with regard to balance, that particular review was quite extensive. This time I'll be looking at somewhat fewer categories, but it's still nice to see where certain aspects stand, especially any newer features.

Beta 12 leaderboards have been archived here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-230303-240227.html), with scoresheets for all runs available here (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/versions/Beta12.html).

During Beta 12 (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1663.0) "Encrypted Comms" (March 2023 ~ Feb 2024), 790 unique players submitted 8,592 runs that met the minimum threshold for inclusion. 296 (3.4%) of those were played in a special or challenge mode (a lower percentage than last time (8%) since no new modes were released during Beta 12), leaving us with 8,296 runs for our data analysis. (There are also many prerelease runs by patrons, but those are excluded as well, since the version is still in flux at that point.)

Wins

The overall win rate was 4.7%, so fairly middling as far as historical stats go.

Among the 7,143 Rogue-level runs (86.1%), 97 (16.5%) unique players earned at least one Beta 12 win, seemingly confirming that the increase in that metric following the Beta 11 rebalance is here to stay. Maybe it will reverse down again next time in Beta 13 with the influx of new and returning players now that we have map zooming and the new upscaled UI layouts? We'll see, but for now it looks like Beta 11 did indeed have a sizeable impact on winnability, perhaps making it a bit easier for some (?)... or our sample size is still too small to draw conclusions like this, what with different folks coming and going over the long term :P

(https://i.imgur.com/SR6FcgZ.png)

(This is an updated graph from our Beta 11 stats--the Beta 12 prereleases would show a similar comparison, but it's not being included here.)

This time around I compiled a new category of win data people have been curious about: win types. As of Beta 10 there are 9 different win types, and according to Beta 12 records, 11 Rogue difficulty players have at some point earned every single win type at least once (there might be more who did not play Beta 12 in particular). Adding in Adventurer/Explorer runs does not change the count, which makes sense since it's generally the more hardcore players going up against every single ending (and winning).

Some other Rogue-specific win type data (remember that despite this including historical runs from earlier versions, our data is only looking at those who at least played one qualifying Beta 12 run):

(https://i.imgur.com/YwVQnSb.png)

Thus 32.0% of Beta 12 players have one at least one run at some point before, and 15.6% have at least two different types.

(https://i.imgur.com/NX0LUiP.png)

w0 is the most common, of course, and although we we can't really know how many "w0 of shame" that includes, a respectable near-half of runs are alternative wins requiring at least one late-game branch visit. Some of the win types are clearly rare, either because they're difficult to discover, or are simply really challenging (leading in many cases to a w0 instead when the primary goal was not achieved).

Among the unique winning accomplishments that aren't explicitly represented by a win type, special shoutout to Runia for being the first and only player to have successfully managed to fire the Drained L-Cannon and even use it to get an extended ++ win. Some video and summary/notes by Runia here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Cogmind/comments/11uedcg/just_beat_extended_game_with_a_weapon_that_takes/)--EXTREME EXTENDED GAME SPOILERS.

Scrap Engine

One of the main new features of Beta 12, even though not yet fully integrated plot-wise, was the already mechanically-complete easily-acquired Scrap Engine (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2022/10/the-scrap-engine/). We have a few basic stats on that.

472 runs (5.7%) used the Scrap Engine (SE) at all, and a total of 127 unique players (21.6%) tried it at least once. 71 winning runs used the SE, or 15.0% of all SE runs, most of them using it heavily as opposed to for a short time. Naturally these same folks generally created and modified greater numbers of constructs.

(https://i.imgur.com/JqKMIEo.png)

(Construct creation does not include modifications to existing constructs, a much greater number by around a factor of 20.)

Garrisons and DSFs

One of the other major enhancements of Beta 12 was the new Garrisons (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2022/07/garrisons-2-0/), so that probably means more Garrison visits and use of related mechanics.

18.3% of runs entered at least one Garrison in Beta 12, compared to 12.0% in Beta 11. 4.0% entered three or more (2.6% did so in Beta 11).

But continuing to follow our general RIF stats in this version, we can can see how garrison visitors were somewhat less interested in bothacking this time around, thus were clearly eager to enter Garrisons specifically to see the sights and/or acquire the other new benefits.

(https://i.imgur.com/yjdx5jv.png)

Speaking of new benefits, at least 1.2% of runs acquired the Encrypted Comm Array. The true number is likely higher, but it wasn't until Beta 13 that I added a way to more easily analyze that in the scoresheets, so I'm basing it purely on the number of runs in which it was actually used to rendezvous with allies (technically not a requirement to ultimately benefit).

(https://i.imgur.com/ZZGXfGQ.png)

One of our other small maps-between-maps, DSFs (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/12/maps-between-maps-and-dsfs/) are also relatively new, having only been added in Beta 11. Last time I reported that 10.5% of runs visited at least one, and interestingly that level continues to hold, with 10.9% of runs visiting a DSF in Beta 12. It appears we can say with confidence that DSFs have their uses and are doing just fine--I know I've ducked into them on occasion either for fun, or to avoid trouble or get a quick build together.

Strats and Miscellany

Traps, reborn as a strong supporting strategy as of Beta 11 and gaining significant popuarity from then on, continue to enjoy the same popularity with 445 extractions by the top 20 trap users in Beta 12, compared to 428 before. The average number of traps and overall Trap Extractor use remained similar. Traps good.

Among the many uses of traps is convoy interception. 21.7% of runs that made it to -7 (lowest convoy depth) reported at least one interception. Now technically the player may not be the one who triggers it, but for some folks we can see it's quite clearly deliberate, especially those who intercept numerous convoys, and just happen to be heavy trap users, one of the most reliable ways to accomplish that task...

(https://i.imgur.com/H4McO1t.png)

Notice how many of the leading convoy interceptors are also on their way to winning runs. Pure coincidence, I'm sure ;)

From the data I think everyone's come to terms with the Beta 11 fabrication overhaul (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2021/11/design-overhaul-4-fabrication-2-0/) and is making healthy use of the system. 35.2% of runs built at least one part, only a little lower than Beta 11, and an average of 1.38 parts were built (1.6 in Beta 11, 2.5 in Beta 10). (Note: As usual fab stats are only looking at runs that made it to at least -6.) 12.4% of runs built a robot, 0.53 on average.

20.6% of runs carried at least one Authchip, significantly higher than the 11.8% of Beta 11, and 46% of those runs used at least one of them to build something, not as high as in Beta 11 when everyone was still getting familiar with the system and how they wanted to make use of it, but significant enough to see that a good portion of players know what they want out of Authchips and are packing them in advance with a possible goal in mind.

Also with respect to Fabricators... only 4.6% of runs that reached -6 used some amount of fabnet, down from 7.9% in Beta 11 when it was introduced. And only 3 runs hit the cap (15%), down a lot since last time as well. So it does look like the previous release was more folks who wanted to try out a new feature (after even discovering it anyway--I'm sure many don't know it exists), and now it's settled down to being just another tool that might get some use in the right kind of run. MTF autooverrided the most bots in a single run with 40, and at only a 6% peak throughout, so it also helps to spread out lower numbers over a greater stretch of depths (he didn't even start until -3, then had a fabnet up for the remainder of that run which went on to an extended win).

One of the activities that's been somewhat more common in the Cogmind community lately, either as a goal in itself, or something to survive after causing too much trouble for some other reason, is sterilization. Forcing Complex 0b10 into a complete floorwide meltdown can be quite a challenge, rewarding if pulled off, and let's face it, is pretty funny when you get to walk around an empty floor with hopefully enough cooling to loot the place before being forced out :D

Surprisingly 354 runs (4.4%) sterilized at least one floor in Beta 12. Less surprisingly, none of the top 10 sterilization runs went on to win...

(https://i.imgur.com/3ji8azW.png)

Despite not quite reaching the end, leiavoia did top the overall leaderboards within their epic sterilization run (https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/nCBUwK61tPrraX2p2) for the sheer score achieved by doing this, even without a win. As you can see some sterilization-oriented runs also tend to be on the longer side--it takes a while to both set up for and destroy that many bots while avoiding a swift death!

17.2% of the runs that completed two sterilizations did go on to win, however. 10.1% of the runs that only completed a single sterilization ended up winning, more than twice the overall win rate. Sterilizers are serious, 0b10.

(My own last run ended up sterilizing -3/Research in order to escape after I was blocked into a corner for plastering one too many walls with robot guts. It was a win, too, although not included in these stats because that's Beta 13...)

And finally, following up on one of Beta 11's new strategic options that I covered in more detail last time: the Exo build. Only 11 runs used Exo in Beta 12, or 0.1% of the total, compared to 82 (0.8%) in Beta 11. It was a new thing back then, so not surprising there was more uptake in the previous release. 95.2% of those which entered and survived S7 did not integrate (compared to 73.1% in Beta 11). It's usually a last resort sort of thing for most people, or something to fool around with, since it either offers less challenge, or a very different kind of challenge (it's not like everyone easily survives using it :P). I mentioned before that it might get further tweaks, but so far it seems about where I'd like it to be insofar as it serves its purpose in terms of lore, balance, and strategic options.

Beta 13 Stat Summary

Following the massive Beta 14 release (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=1763.0), it's time to look back at Beta 13 for some relevant points of interest in the stats! (Again, the leaderboards were reset and the older leaderboard records and run data were archived, all accessible from the usual page (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/).)

Beta 13 ran from about Feb 27 to Aug 7 this year, a 5.3-month period during which a whopping 24,161 qualifying runs were submitted by 1,989 unique players. This compared to Beta 12 which covered a 12-month period and saw 8.5k submissions by 790 players.

The 152% increase in players and 181% increase in runs can be attributed to several drivers:

• new UI layouts and the larger fonts enabled by them led to renewed interest among potential players who had stayed away before, or others who couldn't play much due to Cogmind's former lack of suitability on smaller displays
• the addition of map zooming as a similar supplementary feature enabling even larger tiles specifically for the map
• can't forget the famous Dosh video (https://youtu.be/3b11EA6XW3w) which garnered broad attention among folks more likely to enjoy a game like Cogmind
• Youngster also made a cool video (https://youtu.be/Ceea6wHEukQ) which made the rounds in the roguelike community, showcasing the other new layout/text features

The combination of UI layouts and Dosh's video in particular were a perfect coincidence, as the impact of either would've been much reduced in isolation without the other to amplify the effects. Normalizing for version duration, technically b13 experienced a 536% increase in run count and 470% increase in unique players over b12! The run count got so high that earlier this year it forced me to update how the leaderboards and run data are handled in order to actually process it all, heh.

One thing I haven't checked before is just how many new players we have during a given Beta, and it seems pretty relevant this time around given all the factors above. To measure this I considered anyone with a total run count of less than 5 as of their first successful Beta 13 submission to be a "new player," since we have to take into account the fact that not all players will have uploaded their first few runs (especially those for new players who may just die real quickly at first, keeping them below the score threshold). On the other side, former players will probably have done at least 4 runs during one or more previous versions. Although not perfectly accurate, this methodology should still give us a fairly representative view. (There are other methods, but they all have various drawbacks, and this one's quick :P)

By this metric, we had 145 "new players" join (and submit scores!) during Beta 12 (18.1% of those playing that version)
compared to 1,104 in Beta 13! (a majority of the total at 53.5%)

Somewhat complicating this comparison is that Dosh video in which he explicitly suggested that folks upload their score data for the leaderboards, meaning there's a higher likelihood that a greater ratio of the new players did just that.

I would expect this development to cause the win rate to retrace back to earlier levels, which we'll examine further below.

But first a quick look at the difficulty spread, which shows a continuing skew towards Rogue mode (I skipped checking this in Beta 12):

(https://i.imgur.com/IVh22vh.png)

71.9% of players were using Rogue difficulty in Beta 13, a new high since introducing the new menu to force manual difficulty selection. In general it would appear that our new players are more inclined to select Cogmind's intended (hardest) difficulty mode. However, this data is not entirely representative of non-Rogue use, since it excludes any runs using the checkpoint/load feature, which to be honest is probably a significant portion of non-Rogue players! So we do have some larger portion of players using other modes, though anecdotally, the majority of players who are playing often in the community are indeed using Rogue mode. I do wonder about the true numbers. (At the same time, if someone allows themselves to die before loading a checkpoint, we do get at least that first run and they are indeed represented here.)

Play counts of special event modes remained relatively low since no new ones were introduced in this period, and due to the higher portion of new players overall (as they're naturally still focused on the base game). Only 1.8% of all submissions were for special modes, 61.4% of those being RPGLIKE runs since a handful of folks mostly or exclusively play that way. All those runs will be filtered out of further stats below, leaving us with 23,727 runs for our data.

Wins

The number of Beta 13 players with at least 1 Rogue win took an obvious nose dive :P

(https://i.imgur.com/Uv7G2ri.png)

Not at all unexpected, given the large portion of new players, but still, that's the lowest on record. Well, it might have been lower even further back, especially in times when the game was overall harder and community experience level lower, but for our purposes here I just updated the graph I've been using since Beta 8. Balance-wise Beta 13 didn't itself introduce a noticeable difficulty spike, either, essentially on par with Beta 12 before it. So it's pretty easy to see where the new value came from :) (another small contributing factor: the Beta 13 collection cycle was less than half as long as Beta 12, giving players who can't win consistently less time in which to do that)

Looking at the now-archived Beta 13 leaderboards (https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/scores/archive-240227-240807.html), the highest-scoring run was a 347,363-point run (https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/bgy6atAMMgN2kPzSK.txt) by lyrabold that beat even leiavoia's 256,686-point sterilization run (https://cogmind-api.gridsagegames.com/scoresheets/nCBUwK61tPrraX2p2.txt) in Beta 12 (full scoresheets for these runs naturally contain spoilers!). Both had the same number of sterilizations, the main way to rack up ridiculous point totals assuming you can survive the onslaught, though lyrabold came out higher in the end with more bonus points earned primarily while full clearing extended areas as well. Lyrabold recorded their entire run, which you can watch here if interested (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa9ookYnZqf1Tm_ex1PtEghDOJOcPv5gX)! The run took nearly 35 hours.

While we're on the topic, although prerelease runs aren't included in normal stats, leiavoia also did a 23-hour sterilization run back when Beta 12 was in development (score: 225,650 (https://leiavoia.net/cogmind/dataminer/index.html?YD9ZAuv55YAKqQiqv)), and you can view that online here (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgSRAwnYg70TyQOp619LpBJUWhWKBhjgj) (playlist starts with a shorter highlights clip!).

UI/Options

The highlight of Beta 13, and the part of the stats I've most looked forward to examining this round: sweet sweet QoL! In particular we now get to find out just how popular each of the new primary features are, likely validating with hard numbers that big detour which delayed our ongoing Scraptown expansion.

Earlier this year just two weeks after the release of Beta 13, I couldn't wait and did a preliminary summary of related options using run submission data at the time to get an initial idea of UI layout preferences and map zoom usage.

At the time what I saw was not surprising, a significant uptake of the modal interfaces alongside a smaller minority using map zooming. Low zoom use was expected since the layouts themselves help resolve much of the issue map zooming would also address, with the latter mostly coming in handy intermittently for those continuing to use the original Non-modal layout.

(https://i.imgur.com/wEeWoAA.png)

To give more context: the Semi-modal layout is the default, so anyone wanting to use the original Non-modal layout after Beta 13 released would have to switch back to it manually in the options, as we can see it's likely a decent chunk of players did (as opposed to purely new players preferring it).

Moving on to final Beta 13 figures, the Semi-modal layout continued to eat away at the other two, no doubt because it's the default and we have so many new players, but it does also happen to be the most balanced and appropriate layout for the average player anyway (especially new ones).

(https://i.imgur.com/UOP5DOs.png)

Given that ratio of new players, another aspect I wanted to examine here was specifically how many previous players coming into Beta 13 had accepted new layouts. Does their distribution differ from the above data? Did more of them proactively switch back to the original Non-modal UI?

Interestingly, the ratios are almost identical!? This was a surprising find, to see that having experience with and being used to the Non-modal layout didn't stop players from embracing the new ones, although certainly there's still about that same 24% remaining on Non-modal (there's only a 0.6% difference :P), so it's not like it's been completely abandoned.

As for map zooming, now an even smaller portion of players use it, down from 19% to only 10%, but it does at least come in useful for some.

(https://i.imgur.com/ZISmDlD.png)

What I'm interested in knowing is just who is using map zooming, and are they the category of players I had expected to be getting the most out of it (Non-modal UI layout users, the situation it was primarily designed for in the first place). Looking at the cross-section of UI layouts vs map zoom usage, the data now supports that assumption:

(https://i.imgur.com/x3E1I4t.png)

That the fully Modal layout and its middling map view area sees the second highest amount of map zooming is a bit interesting, and we can presume it's due to that layout being a popular choice on physically smaller displays. For example the Steam Deck is now more semi-officially supported with the introduction of these layouts, additional font style choices, and of course map zooming if needed, and compiling that data does show that 12.2% of players falling under the high-use category of map zooming happen to be playing on the Steam Deck. This compared to Steam Deck users comprising only 1.6% of players among those using little to no map zooming.

Note that for the above and below player preference data I took the last run submitted by each player, likely more representative of the settings they'd become more comfortable with over time. I know many existing players spent time experimenting with the new alternative options on beginning Beta 13, and even new players may try out different options before making a final decision, so this gives us a more stable, representative data set.

Aside from Beta 13's headline features, it's actually been a long while since I've taken a look at the distribution of other player preferences, because after the initial years they tended to remain relatively static over time, but now that we have new layouts, many new players, and also no doubt a wider variety of new hardware folks may be using, it's about time to revisit these meta stats as well.

Specifically the last time I included the "meta" category in my stats summary was five years ago with Beta 8 (https://www.gridsagegames.com/forums/index.php?topic=205.msg8949#msg8949) (2019), so we can compare to what has changed since then, if anything.

• 96.1% of players use fullscreen (31.1% of those use borderless windowed mode). This is the highest ever portion for fullscreen use, almost certainly a result of the new UI layouts that allowed more folks access to Cogmind on even laptops.
• 5.8% use hjkl for movement, still relatively unchanged over the years as a niche option, while 50.3% prefer mouse, 18.6% use arrows, and 25.3% use numpad. This data is really interesting, finally breaking the long-time dominance of numpad as a keyboard movement option, with a significant boost to both mouse and arrow usage, further providing very strong support to the laptop theory.
• 5.1% prefer ASCII instead of tiles, a value that continues to decline as more and more new players outside the traditional roguelike audience discover Cogmind. That's by far the lowest this value has ever been, starting out with a sizeable chunk (15-25%!) of early adopters using ASCII during the initial Alpha years, falling closer to 10% upon arrival on Steam, and now we're here with a second wider influx of players. Another factor that can affect this value are those who were originally playing on smaller displays and needed ASCII to be able to at least better read what was going on, but who are now able to use tiles due to the cell size increase via new layouts. I don't imagine that is responsible for much of the change, though, just noting it.
• 20.5% of players use keyboard mode (not generally using the mouse at all), which is interesting in that this value continues to remain steady despite the influx of new players influencing other preference data, though at the same time possibly supported due to heavier laptop use, where mouse or trackpads are not as convenient. Also keyboard mode is pretty efficient and can do everything, after all, and hardcore roguelike enjoyers (or just the software types that tend to be attracted to a game like Cogmind :P) do like a good shortcut that makes you feel like a hacker once those commands start rolling off your fingertips ;)
• 2.0% of players have rebinded at least one command, still quite low but a slight uptick over previous years (this particular feature is not super accessible, so low utiliization is to be expected, although by default there are already so many ways to perform different actions, on top of full mouse support, that it's generally not needed anyway).
• Smallcaps (the default) is the most popular font choice (82.7%) by an even higher margin than in previous years, followed by Terminus (7.1%), and X11 (2.6%). The latter two dropped significantly as a percentage, having been overtaken by default-using new players as well as the introduction of a few other styles--most styles have at least a couple dozen or so users, though the only styles available at all or most resolutions happen to be the three listed above, so naturally they are more likekly to have more users for that reason alone.
• 1080p is still the most common resolution, not falling by much compared to before at about half of players. However, whereas in the past most others were using something lower than 1080p, now the reverse is true--a majority of non-1080p users are on something higher.
• 1.0% of players are using a render filter, most to enable low-contrast mode.
• 61.4% of players are using Tactical HUD mode, down a good bit from earlier versions, but easily explained by the new player majority this Beta. I'm sure it will gradually drift back up again as more folks get more experience and need the extra data.

Strategy

In terms of content Beta 12 did not add significant new long-term strategic options, having postponed the main thrust of the UFD update to Beta 14 in order to deliver new interface features. Thus with this particular version there aren't as many gameplay elements I want to analyze, although we could perhaps set the stage for a Beta 14 comparison by looking at player interaction with the new early-game Subcaves map.

The Subcaves provide a more dangerous alternative to traveling directly through Materials or its other branches, as well as in most cases an alternative unique item to build around in the form of temp slot parts (and some other long-term useful parts that can only be found there, albeit not uniques).

Subcaves' primary obvious routing competitor would be Exiles, being mutually exclusive branches that can each provide one or more unique parts. In Beta 13, 7,031 Rogue runs visited either Exiles or Subcaves, 32.9% of all Rogue runs which are what I'm interested in examining here (Cogmind being balanced around that mode to begin with). 4,526 of those runs (21.2% of the total) visited Exiles, and 244 died there :P. Those 5.4% of Exiles visits ending in death for the most part represent failed heists. By comparison, fewer runs visited Subcaves (2,505, 11.7% of the total), and unsurprisingly 1,279 died there. That's 51.1% of visits, 6.0% of the run total, which makes sense since Subcaves is very hostile by default and also always at -10 when players are at their weakest. Plus of course for now everyone has less overall experience tackling that new area.

I expect Subcaves performance to improve going forward as players learn how to more safely navigate them, or even outright avoid the map as too dangerous under some circumstances, although as of Beta 14 there are also new draws to that map in the form of added connections to Scraptown, so the visits and deaths will continue until experience improves!

Subcaves also has that one exit directly to Recycling, again preparing the stage for Beta 14 routes, if not yet so desirable in Beta 13 since Recycling doesn't offer much else other than depth skipping and the Scrap Engine, which at the time was still freely given.

Regarding the Scrap Engine, while 4.4% of players in Beta 12 used it at least a bit (when it was introduced), that number was down to 2.1% in Beta 13, although the relatively high new player count of course meant that far fewer would even find it at all, considering how out of the way it is. So the stats make sense, and there were of course still people fooling around with it, but clearly not a common run choice.