Copper Crown Gold Efficiency
This is obviously an imperfect metric, but I feel it's kinda of an interesting metric. This is total gold earned/distance, or gold/block, or in other words, the gold efficiency. This tracks how much gold on averag every block took.
These are with the Power Ranking's team's stats, which are just gold-rushes. I wish I had an easier way to track gold overall, but I don't, and most gold seems to come from goldrushes anyway.
Another caveat about gold efficiency, since this is total goldrush gold/distance, this includes gold that is never spent (say you run out of time), or is spent on dynamite, etc, and so technically is not "the price of a block." Still, since time efficiency is efficiency, I'll stick to the term "gold efficiency."
Additionally, this method disadvantages side-caches a bit, but I'd hope that gold/time spent on side-caches would repay themselves in distance (I have my doubts if this is true though)
First: the gold leaderboard:
Purple: 776
Pink: 754
Orange: 625
Cyan: 572
Green: 540
Yellow: 537
Lime: 535
Aqua: 476
Blue: 464
Red: 403
Mean: 568
Std: 120
The distance leaderboard (caches on the side):
Pink: 285 (3c)
Purple: 273 (1c)
Lime: 260 (0c)
Orange: 255 (0c)
Cyan: 243 (1c)
Green: 152 (2c)
Blue: 152 (0c)
Aqua: 144 (2c)
Red: 144 (1c)
Yellow: 125 (0c)
Mean: 203.3
Std: 64.484
The gold/distance leaderboard.
Lime: 2.058
Cyan: 2.354
Orange: 2.451
Pink 2.645
Red: 2.799
Purple: 2.842
Blue 3.053
Aqua: 3.306
Green: 3.553
Yellow: 4.296
Mean: 2.935611687
Std: 0.652980238
And here's a little graph:
There's the data, here's some interpretation:
Yellow is middle of the pack in gold, but does by far the worst in efficiency, with an average of 4.2gold/block. Due to this, they plunk 10th. In sharp contrast, Lime actually does worse in goldrush gold, doesn't get any caches or anything, but with a a pretty clear 2.058 gold efficiency they manage to get 3rd overall. Gold efficiency is pretty important.
Less interesting but perhaps more important are Purple and Pink, teams that gapped the other teams hard in terms of gold-rushes. Despite being only middle of the pack in gold efficiency, they get 1st and 2nd handily.
Indeed (take this with a shaker of salt since the sample size is tiny), the correlation between gold and coins (r = 0.8402) is a fair bit bigger than that between efficiency and coins (0.6853).
What does this mean? It supports what was already pretty clear, gold earned is probably the single most important statistic in RRR. As important as gold-efficiency is (see yellow vs Lime), Maximizing gold income in RRR is probably the single most important thing a team can do to succeed.
What's interesting is gold earned is a pretty easily improvable stat, dynamite by far seems the best way to earn gold, and it doesn't tech a mechanical god or a gamesense genius to plonk down 5 sticks. The event is getting better at this, at spamming dynamite, but there's still space to improve.
Teams are already starting (i think) to just focus on dynamite for the first gold-rush instead of spending it on rails, if they shifted more of their focus to spamming dynamite for the second gold rush it might pay off.
After gold rushes are optimized, it seems like only then gold efficiency (which doesn't just include cost of building, it also accounts for the time it takes) will become the most important factor in a team's success, which is to me a good bit more interesting than goldrush efficiency. This is fairly easy on easy maps (for example, I believe Yellow in TRE was below 1.5, and past events have had a few 1.6s), but gets much harder on harder maps (TCC's lowest was 2g/d). Mirrorwing believes the lower limit is around 1.1 (on this map at least, and almost certainly similar for the easier ones too), but that has some strange tech so I'd expect the realistic team number to be closer to 1.5 on a hard map, possibly slightly lower on an easy map.
anyway I'm excited for Snowdown's RRR and if it gets played I'll probably do a similar post
Posted Dec 9, 2025, 8:51 AM UTC