Diversify Your Personnel Portfolio

by Nathan W, Staff Writer

12th April 2010

To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
-William Blake

For the past few years, perhaps no card has generated so much hate as the blabbing Bolian barber Mot (The Barber). Mot personified the reoccurring issue of micro-teams sneaking around and avoiding dilemmas. With his recent erratum, perhaps the final nail in the coffin to this larger issue has manifested into what could be described as the most game-changing card in Infinite Diversity: Transport Crash Survivor.

However, once you make your way through the direct impact this card will have on future deck designs, the reality begins to set in that if you play this mission, you may actually have to complete it to win the game. For this reason, the card is so beautifully designed for a set named Infinite Diversity – in that you will need a diverse set of skills to successfully complete this mission.

But really, what is diversity when it comes to personnel selection? Surely personnel that have a number of skills are nice, but having repeats of the same skills doesn’t help. Some skills are very common, and others are quite rare. With these things in mind, I set out to quantify the value of each of the 23 different skills; assigning a diversity score to each based upon its rarity.

The diversity score for each skill is calculated as the total number of listed skills divided by the number of personnel with that skill (i.e. for Leadership: 3850/291 = 13). Comparing the ratio of diversity scores between two different skills represents how likely a random personnel is to have one skill over another. In the extreme case (Leadership vs. Telepathy) any given personnel is nearly 16 times more likely to have Leadership than Telepathy.

At this point, I decided to investigate various personnel that might appear to be well-suited to complete Transport Crash Survivor. There are 20 personnel who have seven listed skills. Maximilian Forrest (Confident Captain) is the only personnel with eight listed skills. I calculated each of these personnel’s total diversity score as the sum of the diversity scores of their listed skills. For example, the total diversity score for Breen Founder (Persuader) was calculated as 38 (Archaeology) + 18 (Engineer) + 25 (Exobiology) + 37 (Geology) + 57 (Intelligence) + 19 (Science) + 30 (Transporters) = 224. Repeated skills such as 2 Treachery were only counted once.

While it may be easiest to simply value personnel to include in your deck based upon the diversity scores I presented above, a more preciseaffiliation-specific metric should be used when designing your own deck. For example, Acquisition is a rare skill with a high diversity score among all personnel, but if you are playing with Ferenginar (Financial Hub) it is fairly common and should be de-valued.

To calculate your own diversity scores, you will need to count the number of personnel with each skill for the affiliation you would like to play, similar to what I did in the second column of the first table above. This can be done in DeckPADD, garak.it, or many other deck building programs. Then calculate diversity scores as the total divided by the number of personnel with that skill.

Infinite Diversity has a number of different cards that will stress the importance of diversity in your deck and strategy. Diversity will not only help you complete this unique mission, but will help you be better prepared for the strategies and surprises of your opponent and come through with that unplanned victory.

Ed Harken: A lot of you have been hearing the affiliates complaining about a lack of diversity on the news team.
Champ Kind: What in the hell’s diversity?
Ron Burgundy: Well, I could be wrong, but I believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.
-Anchorman

-djl-