[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by Haer

One of the most frequent complaints I see on the forums/IRC is that a particular round has 'bad' stats'. To some extent such judgements will be based on personal taste, but it has lead me to wonder - is there some set of objective criteria by which we can say a set of stats are better/worse than another set?

No. End of thread.

...OK, fine. My point stands, but take into account that the remainder of this post is probably not objective holy truth but just my best attempt at such.

Originally Posted by Haer

Personally, I think if we could find some kind of criteria like this it would help us to be a lot more certain about which rounds really had good stats and which didn't, and in the end lead to better stats for future rounds.

Unfortunately, we don't have that, not even in the most fundamental sense. Hell, I'm not even sure why it appears that there's a correlation between the average number of targets ships have and the defensiveness of the stats. A higher number of targets probably overly benefits defense. But how?

Originally Posted by Haer

Race balance means that each race has a roughly equal chance of doing well. People often look at the distribution of races in the top100, and I think this is a fairly good measure, although you should probably look at the top10/50/200 as well, and perhaps normalise by the total number of each race.

Realize that some people will think of 'all races should be the same' when they hear the word 'balance', even if that's the wrong way to look at it. This leads to pointless arguments whenever the word 'balance' is used in a positive sense, because that will inevitably lead to responses along the lines of "how can you possibly want all races to be identical!?".

Originally Posted by Haer

For attack/defence balance, this means roughly how easy it is to land/stop an attack. This can be a little harder to measure, but something that could be looked at is the number of launched attacks which land and the number of launched attacks which cap. If further data was available, you could look at for each withdrawn attack, what ratio of defending value to attacking value was necessary on average.

This is an important aspect to take into account when making and judging stats, but I think the word 'balance' is misleading. We're not necessarily looking to balance the two. We're trying to craft a game that is fun and rewarding. Hypothetically(!), If that required attacks to be impossible to stop, then so be it. That said, having seen both very defensive stats (r51, you're welcome) and very offensive ones (r59, blame Tia) in recent history, it has become clear (to me, at least) that the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, probably somewhat (but not overly) favoring offense.

Originally Posted by Haer

For each individual race, you'd ideally want a least 2 feasible ship strategies and maybe more. If data was available about the total distribution of ships in the universe, you could try to do some kind of clustering and then count the numbers.

Agreed. A pre-round choice (made before you necessarily even understand what 'good' is) should not fix you or your alliance in place for the next 1177 ticks.

I think you've identified the three main points: balance between races, correct relation between attack and defense, and a variety of ship strategies for each race.

I'd like to see a wider range of possibilities on that last point, though this is not possible in the current framework for ship stats:

What I would like to make possible is a true evolution of ship strategies as the round progresses. Right now, almost all ships are available on the first night out of protection, and all of them are on the second night. You can pick a ship strategy at tick 0 and stick with it for the remainder of the round. That's pretty static (that's a euphemism for 'boring'). We could delay the research on certain ship classes until much later in the round. Release FR/DE at tick ~400 and CR/BS at tick ~700, making each advance significantly stronger than the previous classes. You can either save up resources, crippling your early round growth, then get a growth spurt near the end of the round to make up for it, or spend on Fr/De, grow slowly and steadily throughout the round, or go for Fi/Co, sprint to the front of the pack early on, then work the rest of the round to maintain your lead.

That's not the only way in which such evolution is possible. You could provide the ability to upgrade existing ships through research. I'd assign different limits to upgradability to each ship class. Make some classes strong with few upgrades, some weak with many upgrades, and some in between. Like the above, this allows you to choose a longer term strategy than is currently possible. This does lead to an explosion in the number of 'ships' (each base ship and each of its upgraded forms could be considered a ship in itself), and that the number of ships is already too high. Fortunately, there is no real reason why each race needs its own set of ships. We could combine them all into one big pool of, say, 18 combat ships (each with 1-3 upgrades), 6 pods and 2-3 SKs, instead of 40-50 combat ships, 10-15 pods and 5 SKs, split into 5 mutually exclusive sets.

Originally Posted by Haer

While figuring this sort of stuff out isn't trivial, I dont think it would take a massive amount of work either; much of this can be calculated using standard software libraries. The main obstacle as I see it is lack of data; We already get some random stats about the universe, it'd be really nice if we could see this sort of information included for future rounds.

As far as I know, the entire (tick-by-tick) database for every round since 14 has been saved, so in principle, this data could still be calculated for past rounds.