The top 6 most important civilization bonuses are...

The most important civilization bonuses are:

1. Castle cost in stone,

2. Crop Rotation cost in Food,

3. Crop Rotation cost in Wood,

4. Heavy Plow cost in Food in the Castle Age,

5. Heavy Plow cost in Wood in the Castle Age, and

6. Heavy Plow cost in Wood in the Imperial Age

Methodology

I trained various predictive models on the highest win rate among the civilizations recorded at aoestats - Age of Empires 2 Civilization Statistics. For that I needed to convert each civilization bonus into rows of numbers - one column for each civilization. For example, I needed a row that expresses that Koreans have their fortifications built 33% faster. Different buildings have different construction times, so I added one row each for only the buildings that Koreans have that are considered fortifications. I ended up with 1,333 different features for 31 civilizations.

I also performed feature selection to whittle the rows down to the top 6 most important using Recursive Feature Elimination with Logistic Regression, SelectKBest with Chi-squared, RandomForestClassifier, and ExtraTreesClassifier.

The results are in this notebook. Looking at the RFE results, number one is obvious: "Be the Franks; Do not be not the Franks" basically. The rest seem kind of arbitrary. The top six from the other methods change every time I run the test.

(I do not expect this will make your play more enjoyable. This probably just points out where the game is most imbalanced. The reason I spent so much of my free time doing data science on this is because my son plays this game and this was a way for us to have something in common.)