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Originally Posted by Haer

One of the most frequent complaints I see on the forums/IRC is that a particular round has 'bad' stats'.

every round has bad stats for someone who made the wrong choice or who isnt enjoying the round. This round had pretty balanced stats, everyone can roid everyone, XP early game, Value mid game, can XP hold out and keep roiding to stay on top? XP naturally going to Xan who can fake.

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? 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.

There are no criteria and will never be, stats can be awesome and they can be bad but they only play a part in a bigger picture of a round. Alliance politics and strategy carry more weight than stats to do to determine a round, someone made the assumption this round that Xan pwned even though they struggled to keep roids and now we got complaints that the stats suck as they cant hold roids.

To get things started, I'd like to propose a few things which could be looked at. I will begin by saying that I am in general sceptical of the ability of people to judge a set of stats just by looking at them; it may be possible, but I suspect it's just too complex a problem to accurately judge in all but the most obvious of cases. I would be interested in any ideas people have about such a method.

Its possible to work out which races pwn which races, and which individual strat in each race pwns another. Then you look at the race distribution on the universe page to see where everyone else is thinking pre-round and try to gain as much information on other alliance politics and determine if the race/strat which counters the majority is good enough to gift you a nice advantage to hold roids and get roids, or if its better to just conform.

To judge stats based on this will be a good round or bad round is impossible as they only play a small part in the round. However, when the stats are highly defensive and you can clearly see you can hold roids, they are the worst set of stats impossible as it limits solo play, makes blocking stronger and lets the better players just sail off into the distance.

People often throw around the word balance without really defining what it means. In my mind, there are actually two separate things which need to be balanced - races and attack/defence.

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.

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.

For race balance, you need to look at the top200. The decent players will do well regardless of wither there race/strat sucks as they're actually decent. You check balance by looking how well the casual players do, if casuals are pwning as Xan but struggling with everything else (and race distribution is equal) then its quiet clear Xan was too strong but even that isnt right as alliance politics plays into more.

For variance, there are again a few different things you could look at. I think you could break this down into per race ship strat and overall strategy.

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.

For an overall strategy, you could look at doing something similar within statistics like # of attacks launched, # of def fleets launched, # of FCs/MCs/Dists, Gov. choice, etc. Again, you could try a similar kind of analysis - perform clustering and count the number of clusters.

Doesn't work, alliances pick there strats pre-round. It doesnt matter how much balanced the stats are and how many different strats there are available, its pure luck wither all alliances will pick the same strat or completly different ones. Stats generally has very little to do with alliance decision as most suck at reading them.. it usually goes:

Is Fi/co strong? if Yes/Average, go Xan Fi/Co with whatever other races is ok, usually cath.

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.

Heres the problem as well, say we work out and get a definitive list on round stats:

R59: Good
R58: Bad
R57: Best stats ever
R56: ok

and we use this data and select R57 as the next stats to use, It makes very little effect on wither the round will be awesome or bad as alliance politics will come into play and the round will end up different.