Sentinels of the Multiverse Difficulty Score System

by Matthew Gray

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a great game. But, it can be hard to get the right level of difficulty. Some combinations of heroes, villains, and environments are simply too easy, while others are extremely difficult and the default villain difficulty levels only capture a small portion of what's going on. So, here's an attempt at a more complex but more comprehensive way of tuning the difficulty of a Sentinels game. I took the data from the Sentinels Statistics Project, and built a Naive Bayes victory prediction system and converted it into a "difficulty point" based scoring system. The original data may have all sorts of biases, and there's obvious cases where there's strong cross-terms between heroes or villains that's not accounted for, but it seems to work reasonably.

To determine the difficulty of a game, simply add up the difficulty values of the number of players, each of the heroes, the villain and the environment. The last table on the right translates difficulty scores to observed loss rates.

Heroes

HeroDifficulty
Omnitron-U64 ~
Best of Times Chrono Ranger~~
Dark Watch Setback40
Absolute Zero Elemental Wrath31
Bunker30
Prime Warden Captain Cosmic30
Dark Watch Nightmist30
Absolute Zero29
Dark Watch Expatriette29
Dark Watch Fixer23
Mr. Fixer23
Expatriette22
Termi-Nation Bunker~~
Bunker Engine of War17
Termi-Nation Absolute Zero~~
GI Bunker14
KNYFE Rogue Agent13
The Argent Adept9
Captain Cosmic7
Unity7
Santa Guise~~
Tempest; Freedom2
Ra: Horus of Two Horizons1
Rook City Wraith1
Setback0
Parse-1
Fanatic-2
K.N.Y.F.E.-4
Prime Warden Argent Adept-4
Chrono Ranger-5
Tachyon-6
Guise-6
The Eternal Haka-6
Ra-6
Nightmist-7
Kvothe Six-String Argent Adept-8
Termi-Nation Unity~~
Wraith-12
Haka-13
Wraith: Price of Freedom-14
Golem Unity-15
Prime Warden Haka-18
Sky-Scraper-19
The Visionary-19
Dark Visionary-21
The Scholar-23
The Naturalist-27
Tempest-29
Omnitron-X-29
Redeemer Fanatic-30
Prime Warden Fanatic-33
Prime Warden Tempest-36
Young Legacy-36
Legacy-45
Super Scientific Tachyon-51
Scholar of the Infinite-52
The Sentinels-59
Team Leader Tachyon-66
The Greatest Legacy-78
Adamant Sentinels-94 ~
Desperate Naturalist-136 ~
~ Very limited data, so take this number with a grain of salt.
~~ Insufficient data for a reasonable estimate. Play more games and log them.

Villains

VillainDifficulty
Basic
Difficulty
Advanced
Kaargra Warfang97*
Iron Legacy74112
The Chairman6874
Cosmic Omnitron62103
Agent of Gloom Spite53*
Vengeance Five47*
The Dreamer4468
The Matriarch3945
Vengeance Style (Vengeance and Villains)36*
La Capitan1118
Progeny3*
Skinwalker Gloomweaver0*
Infinitor0*
Citizen Dawn-168
Plague Rat-1227
Omnitron-1411
Spite-18-3
Grand Warlord Voss-2476
Akash'bhuta-4115
Apostate-49-71
Unstable Kismet-50***
Miss Information-5089
Mad Bomber Blade-5525
Kismet-65-51
Baron Blade-69-9
Wager Master-83*
The Ennead-8478
Deadline-119-94**
Gloomweaver-120-103
Chokepoint-124***
Ambuscade-135-103
Tormented Infinitor-136***
* Insufficient data in advanced mode to get reliable individual estimates, but probably ~75 points harder than basic.
** Based on relatively low data so expect additional noise in this estimate.

Environments

EnvironmentDifficulty
Rook City63
Ruins of Atlantis49
Madame Mittermeir's46
Omnitron IV34
Magmaria18
Insula Primalis4
Pike Industrial Complex4
Tomb of Anubis2
Silver Gulch 1883-4
Enclave of the Endlings-6
Time Cataclysm-7
Megalopolis-9
Wagner Mars Base-13
Realm of Discord-16
Dok'Thorath-18
Celestial Tribunal-25
Freedom Tower-26
The Court of Blood-28
Temple of Zhu Long-47
Mobile Defense Platform-48
The Block-54
The Final Wasteland-58

Number of Players

PlayersDifficulty
Three45
Four-28
Five-50

Difficulty

TotalGame Loss Probability
275Extremely Hard. 85% chance of losing.
200Very Hard. 73% chance of losing.
100Difficult. 50% chance of losing.
65Challenging. 41% chance of losing.
0Typical. 27% chance of losing.
-65Easy. 16% chance of losing.
-125Very Easy. 10% chance of losing.
-200Extremely Easy. 5% chance of losing.
Sentinels is a co-op game where the players usually win, apropos to the superhero theme.

In my experience, games in the 0 - 150 difficulty range are the most fun. Games below -100 sometimes feel like they are simply automatic wins where what you do doesn't matter. Similarly, above 175, bad luck or good luck feel like they play a more prominent role.

Specific combos may get very high difficulties and be easy and specific combos may yield very low difficulties and be difficult. Enter the results in the Sentinels Tracker and I may occasionally update the model.

This analysis was done by Matthew Gray. Feel free to use this data however you like, including in Sentinels related software, etc. Credit to me and a link back here are appreciated, but not required. Please let me know how you're using it at matthew@gray.org. The difficulty data in JSON format are available to make software use of this data easier.

This version of the model was built on Sat May 28 17:20:27 EDT 2016, and is based on 15934 games from a 5/28/2016 download of the data collected from the Sentinels Tracker Form. You can also see the aggregation of this data by Lynk Fox.