Exploratory Analysis on Game of Thrones Battle Data
Game of Thrones is a notorious TV series that tells an adventure game about Houses rallying each other to take over the throne and protect themselves against turmoil and destruction.
So, obviously every Houses is battling each other in order to claim the highest authority which is the ruler of Seven Kingdoms. There is a lot of House participating in the battle at Westeros Island such as : House Stark, House Lannister, House Tyrell, House Greyjoy, House Baratheon, House Frey, and many more. Houses are join forces one another by marriage or wanted to join the winning side or they just simply very dedicated to a certain House in the first place. The question i wanted to answer is who is the best king in handling the battles so far ?
Data Overview
I use Chris Albon’s “The War of the Five Kings” Dataset, which can be found here: war_of_the_five_kings_dataset . Its a great collection of all of the battles in the series from Battle of the Golden Tooth up to Siege of Winterfell.
The data is imported to a pandas data frame and will be looked like below.
The data consisted by a lot of column, if you guys wanted to know the full description of column metadata, simply just visit this link.
Data Exploratory
The first thing I do is to know how much battle each king have been done in terms of attacking.
From the picture beside, it is shown that Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon have done a lot of battles up to 14 battles. As we know that those Lannisters spark a lot of hatred to a powerful House in the North which is House Stark since they are fuckin’ behead the one and only Lord Ned Stark, and also some Houses are disagree with Joffrey as a successor of Robert Baratheon since they knew Joffrey is an incest result between Cersei and Jaime Lannister. There is no doubt that Lannister do a lot of battle to defend their existence. Followed by Robb Stark, the first son of Ned Stark, his aim is to get vengeance over his beloved father, then Balon/Euron Greyjoy, then Stannis.
The battle is categorized into 4 types which are pitched battle, ambush, siege, and razing.
The histogram shows that from 14 battles Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon has done, its divided into 6 pitched battle, 3 ambush, and 5 siege. But Robb Stark likely to use different approach from Joffrey/Tommen, he preferably to use element of surprise in his battle tactics, since he did 5 ambush tactic out of 10 of his battles while Joffrey/Tommen only use it 3 times out of 14 battles. Surprisingly, all of the kings never raze their enemies in a battle so far except one king which is Balon from House Greyjoy of Pyke.
There are 38 times of battles have been done since the beginning until season 5 in total, each battle is represented by a number from 1 to 38 in order to simplify data visualization. Representation number for each battle is shown in a table below.
Lets take a look into how many armies a king brings to each war they have done shown by histogram below.
The most is Stannis Baratheon armies on Battle of Blackwater, noted that Battle of Blackwater was the largest battle in the War of The Five Kings. Stannis initiate the battle since he wanted to seize the Iron Throne from King Joffrey, and he deploy all his troops into the battle and used naval assault to attack Kings Landing. But, unfortunately he lost the battle because Lannister is reinforced by House Tyrell.
The least is Balon/Euron Greyjoy armies on Battle of Winterfell/Fall of Winterfell. Theon turned on the Stark and seized Winterfell with small amount of troops in order to gain his father respect, he successfully claim Winterfell since there are no guards protecting it because Ser Rodrik sent all the remaining troops to Torrhen’s Square while others are still in a battle with Robb.
Surprisingly, Balon/Euron Greyjoy wins all of his battles as an attacker (100 % attacking success rate), however the average enemy/army ratio is 0 which means whenever Balon/Euron Greyjoy attacks, no one is defending so far. If we see the graph as a whole, there is a tendency that the more average enemy/army ratio the less attacking success rate will be. So far, in terms of attacking Balon/Euron Greyjoy is the best on winning the battle. With note that the number of battles Balon/Euron Greyjoy has done is not as much as Robb Stark and Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon.
Lets see the battle data using a different perspective, which is defending.
In terms of defending, Robb Stark has done more than Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon by 1 point. So overall, in 38 battles that have been done by all kings, 27 of it is involve Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon and 24 of it is involve Robb Stark. It can be said that majority of the battles done so far is about war between those 2 Houses. For Stannis Baratheon and Balon/Euron Greyjoy their battles are not as tense as Lannister and Stark but as we can see earlier, Stannis has done such a large battle like Battle of Blackwater.
If we see how many forces that a king deploy on a battle, The histogram above shows that Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon on Battle of the Green Fork deploys the most army to do defending. Tywin Lannister is the commander of the army on that battle for Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon, he got fooled by Robb Stark since his scout deliver a wrong information about Robb will attack him with huge armies so he prepare a lot of his troops to defend, but in reality there are only 2000 of Robb armies attacking him. Despite winning the battle on the Green Fork, the defeat of Jaime’s forces at the Battle of the Whispering Wood and the subsequent joining of forces of the river lords to Robb’s forces leaves Tywin’s forces exposed and outflanked.
The defend success rate for each king is shown on a graph beside. It shows that Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon has the highest defending success rate compared to the others. Due to incomplete data, there is no defending success rate and average enemy/army ratio for Stannis Baratheon. If the graph is compared to attacking success rate-average enemy/army ratio, there is the same tendencies that the more average enemy/army ratio the less defending success rate will be.
So, the answer for who is the best king in handling the battles so far based on my exploratory analysis, in my opinion is Joffrey/Tommen Baratheon. Since he has done more battle also he has a better defending and attacking success rate compared to other. Moreover, he always keep the ratio between his troops and enemy is close to 1 in every battle, proved by the average enemy/army ratio is 1,13 in attacking terms and in defending terms the value is 0,97.
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If u guys wanted to know my python code in how to process the data, you can find out here. Cheers !
