durgforaday wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 8:00 pm
Would love to see Overwhelmed get some non-dilemma help! Also, a new dilemma like Temptation but with a different set of skills that match up like Honor and Treachery would be another nice partner to Overwhelmed!
I've wanted a version of
Temptation with different skills for a very long time. Before I was even on design, it was a fun puzzle to try to theory-craft what a good pair of skills would be for such a card.
The problem is the math is hard when the data is unavailable. The math is pretty easy for Honor + Treachery, because we know only one personnel has both, we know that both skills are common ones, and we know that generally decks tend to be pretty good at at least one skill or the other. Those aren't assumptions we can make about other skills, and the last time I tried to get some data to poke at those assumptions, the card search engine had a limit to how many results it returns.
...but, while considering this thread for the past few weeks, it occurred to me that
that limitation has been removed and I can go to town on data. So I did!
Here's Table 1:
In this table, we see the 11 most common skills (each skill that is on >300 personnel in the game; total count of the personnel with that skill is above/to the left of the skill name), and each intersection we see the total overlap (the number of personnel who have both of those skills). So, for example, sure Leadership and Officer are both common skills (even more common that Treachery and Honor), but their overlap is really big. I mean, I didn't need the data to tell me that... honestly I expected the overlap to be larger.
Anyways, this table is nice, but it doesn't tell me the total pool - sure, an overlap may be large, but if the skills are more common, they might still have decent reach, right?
So here's Table 2:
In this table, I added the prevalence of each skill, and subtracted the overlap (so that personnel with both skills aren't counted twice. We can see here that no two skills have quite the same reach as Honor + Treachery, but some are close (like Leadership + Programming).
That's not to say that Leadership + Programming is necessarily the best, but the table gives us a good place to start. It doesn't take into account that some personnel are more popular than others, and there are reasons to include (or even
not include) some skills. I do think that
Temptation actually improved as a dilemma during the height of
An Issue of Trust's reign of terror - I know there was certainly a while where every MVB pile used three of each. Now that AIoT's use has declined, Temptation probably isn't quite as good.
Similarly, would a Temptation-esque dilemma that promotes Leadership see a rise in the use of
Personal Duty? If it used Engineer, would
Coolant Leak have a renaissance? Would it even move the needle that much? After all, Temptation itself is not exactly
on fire, it's just a solid dilemma.
Another option that these tables don't account for is the possibility of using three skills (and dipping into the rarer skills) rather than just two. The math there is harder since there are wAAaaaAAAAaay more permutations of three skills rather than just two, so I think, short of someone writing a script to harvest the data, it's easier just to look at specific three-skill combinations. Like, Security and Engineer have a pretty decent depth, but non-Klingon Integrity decks tend to be weak on both - so what if we added a rare third skill like Law?
Anyways, that's probably more of a look into my thinking than anyone was asking for, but I've already spent the time writing it all, so I'm just going to hit submit anyways.