@zephyr1 I couldn’t see if this is an issue or a general thread … or an idea tbh.
Would you have a look.
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War defence teams:
Level …Guardians Ascending…Ayhatnkn
over .3800 … 0 … 2
3600-3800 … 0 … 2
3400-3600 … 6 … 8
3200-3400 … 5 … 3
3000-3200 … 3 … 5
below 3000 …13 …6
Level … Guardians Ascending … France Alliance
over 4000 … 0 … 1
3800-4000 … 0 … 2
3500-3800 … 3 … 7
3200-3500 … 10 … 8
3000-3200 … 8 … 2
2600-3000 … 6 … 4
below 2600 … 1 … 4
The fact that the bias has never been in our favour to the same degree in 14 wars points to some systematic issue
My personal guess is that maybe a large number of your players have been leveling their roster wrong. Normally the standard path is to prioritize one fully leveled 4star team and then move on to deepen the roster.
I see you have many teams below 3400, if many of your members have either been leveling multiple heroes at a time, or are all F2P so have to wait a long time for final ascension, it would explain your situation.
Basically, your hero leveling are too spread out, and at the level at which you are playing it doesn’t help you with war attack either, so you probably have opponents with stronger main teams, and slightly weaker benches, which gives them a huge advantage.
A good rule of thumb : if you have many players level 30 or above without a 3400+ team, then the issue I raised might be it.
Also, loosing by 250 points is a pretty close war! It means it could have easily gone your way with just a handful of luckier boards or better target revival timing.
A single player can have a war of 250 points or 50 points if he doesn’t get a good stack color board
Moderator’s Note
The original thread had coincidentally closed just before the new posts due to inactivity.
The original thread has been reopened, and the new posts have been merged into it. 
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@ochartier - Many thanks for that most illuminating post. It may well explain the issue. But it also raises some new issues.
You mention a “standard path” consisting of striving for a fully levelled 4* team. I was never aware that the path was “standard”, nor that deviating from it could prejudice one’s alliance in wars. I know of many fellow alliance members who have been playing for a number of months and only recently got their first 4* hero. This means that they have a gallery of 3* heros, many possibly unlevelled, and this extended library simply reflects the very natural but unrealised hope of pulling a 4* via occasional single pulls… Could this also be a consequence of mainly F2P players? If so, are 3* heroes also included nin the war score calculation? If so, it seems that in this context the game might provide a distinct bias unfavourable to F2P players, besides all of the obvious uphill battles that they face.
It would seem that, with this insight that not just 4 and 5* heroes are incorporated into the algorithm, players would favour their alliance by feeding their un- or weakly-levelled heroes to their strongest 6. Is this an unintended consequence? If so it should be widely broadcast so that future players make the right choices.
Your rule of thumb is particularly useful. I will air this in our alliance.
Just checked - all of our 30+ players have 3400+ teams … so I am still at a loss to explain the war mismatches
You may be interested to know that I came to almost exactly the same conclusion:
That would definitely extend down to 3*. I don’t recommend this strategy because I suspect it’s pretty dull not having variety in heroes. But…
Some results are starting to appear that are counter-intuitive. It now seems tobe clear that if someone pays a lot (pulling or world energy), plays a lot, levels a lot, will end up having a top-30 roster that prejudices their alliance in wars. At first glance this appears to be counter to a reasonable business plan for Small Giant. Why bludgeon the wallet that feeds you?
It also means that the very natural drive to assemble the upper echelon of rated heros and not to spend time, $$$s and effort levelling up relative dodos, is penalised.
Finally it seems that, all other factors being equal, those with higher skill levels will be progressively penalised.
These 3 in combo → “Houston, we have a problem”.
I’m assuming you’re recording AW defense team strengths rather than raid defense. Some possibilities…
A. Your people’s rosters have more depth than is the norm for an alliance with this level of development.
B. Your alliance isn’t as good as a typical one in this cohort at punching through more advanced defenses.
C. Some of your people have outdated AW defense teams.
D. Your war strategy and/or participation is poor and you’ve exceeded the limit on how much SGG is willing to adjust your war score due to its effects on your results. As you accumulated some losses, morale fell and members became less effective in hitting.
E. SGG is not weighting top-5 heroes enough in the war scores. Similarly, you could have poorer troops and they’re not weighted enough in war scores, or opposing alliances have deep rosters of troops while only the top ones count.
F. Your members’ rosters are tuned to fighting titans, but the war score just uses their card power without understanding this.
It’s actually the opposite, if done right. Having several very strong players among many weak players actually makes pairings easier on average, because you tend to get matched against more uniform-strength alliances. I (and I think others) have started referring to this as a high-variance strategy.
You can see it at play in this pairing of yours. I’d bet the weak players in Ayhatnkn have very weak rosters:
Yup. Unleveled/partially leveled 5s and 4s are a real killer in war pairing. SG adjusted card power down a while ago to try to fix this, but it seems insufficient.
Can you help me understand why this seems so to you?
Well, SG can easily access win-lose statistcs of alliances. If win-lose ration differs significanrly from 50-50, the system does not work.
What comws with our alliance, there have been opponents that beat us hands down, and vice versa. Most of wars have been against alliances of very similar power, many close calls 
50/50 is the ideal up to a point… however alliances that use good stratagies and all their flags should win more often than alliances that don’t… or the meaning of fair starts to sound really unfair to me. They should look at the outcomes of wars with full participation on both sides to get a better idea of how well their current numbers are producing fair wars.
You should get better loot witth higher war points, then the problem of some alliances fooling around could be fixed.
War loot could depend on war points of players participating the war divided by amount of players. Then it would be more rewarding for alliances with better strategy.
Otherwise, war points should reflect actual war performance level, nothing else imho.
You can’t win all wars.
Matching is done with whole bench.
Keep repeating this to everyone.
I really like how this matching system goes, and my alliance never had streak of low morale.
If we lose some, we move on or restructure if needed (we opened vacation alliance for that purpose). When we win, we’re happy.
Currently we are beating 3500 to 2500 alliance which has much bigger total def on field than us (half an hour left). We have strategy and eager players.
Pet Project vs Die Deutche Armee
Since we were founded we only once or twice got someone with similar def formation, all others have those 5 heroes better than we do. We win enough times that our war chest is filling fast.
We can’t win all, because at one point, hero strength overpowers the strategy.
Oh and we are players mostly below 3200 with strongest teams (just one is 3500) and our opponents usually have 5+ above 3400. This had like 8 or so.
We beat them. And have a blast while doing it.
Teamwork and strategy for teamwork. We were winning when hitting the enemy with food (unleveled 2 stars), we are winning now when our lowest is unleveled 3 star, we will win when our lowest will be maxed 4 star
Moderator’s Note: removed recruiting portion of post to resolve Off-Topic portion and allow rest of post to remain. Per #forum-rules, recruiting messages may only be posted in #alliance-recruitment.
Because in the bulk of the world’s games, skilled players are rewarded, not penalised. Why do you reason that striving for excellence in game play should be discouraged?
Couldn’t agree with you more regarding ‘fair’. To reward weak play, or better said, to penalise excellence is game-play means that this is not really a competitive game, but a dumbing down to keep the also-rans happy. Bizarre!!
I find it astonishing that it is openly admitted here that weak teams should win 50% of their wars. This would only be fine (so as to maintain overall enthusiasm) AS LONG AS THE STRONGER TEAMS EARN CORRESPONDINGLY HIGHER AWARDS. From what I read here, that is not the case.
Sorry, let me try that again. If the system channels all teams to a 50:50 win-lose point, and if the teams with higher war scores do not get correspondingly better loot when they win (either per war or on the war chest or preferably both), then there is no point in striving for excellence, other than worthless bragging rights.
The IDEAL is 50:50 but the reality will be different. Weak teams will fall to a level where they are 50:50 against weak teams. As teams become stronger they win more than 50:50 and fill the chest more often. Then they start fighting relatively stronger opponents until back to 50:50. Become stronger and repeat the process. The higher rewards comes from filling the chest faster.
SG could add a grade level to AW like for titans but that means the haves just get more again like everything else in the game.