#557889
I was reading an old article the other day, and, in it, Decipher mentioned that they had a great big database of attributes and rules about which affiliations could get which attributes. And I thought to myself, "Aw heck, I don't even know what the overall average attributes are!"
But I have database access and it seems criminal not to use it for the good of the community, so I did some research and now I know some stuff.
Here are the broadest takeaways:
The average personnel is 6/7/6 for a total of 19 attribute points. (Actually 5.8/7.0/6.3 = 19.1, but decimals are hard.)
There's a lot of variance in there. Standard deviation is 1.8 for INTEGRITY, 1.5 for CUNNING, and 2.1 for STRENGTH, or 3.1 for total attributes combined. Which means everyone with as few as 16 total attributes and as many as 22 attributes is within the game's broad middle, within one standard deviation of average.
(I have no idea whether this data is normally distributed or skewed. My bet is skewed. I didn't check.) Of course, we have to keep making people on both sides of that line in order to keep it there, or escalation will happen.
That said, we've done a pretty good job of preventing personnel attribute escalation over time!
In PAQ (1994-1996), the average personnel was 5.8/6.8/5.7 = 18.5, and stayed there in FC/DS9.
Decipher turned up the heat a bit in the Golden Age (5.7/7.2/6.7 = 19.5), but this is just about the only thing that DIDN'T escalate in VOY/HA (5.8/7.2/6.4 = 19.5). Attributes held steady for the rest of the Decipher era.
When the CC took over, we actually lowered the temperature back to the PAQ/FC/DS9-era. In each two-year period from 2009-2017, we consistently stayed between 18.6 and 18.8 total attributes on average (generally 5/7/6).
But things started heating up a bit in 2019, when we cracked the 19 average total attributes barrier for the first time since the Golden Age, and we've continued that pattern. The 2020-2021 period (which, to be fair, is not yet complete) saw the highest average total attributes in the history of the game: 5.8/7.2/7.1 = 20.1. Something to keep an eye on!
For the most part, though, we've done well. I honestly expected to see more attribute inflation in the CC era, especially in individual affiliations. But there's not much of that. Sure, Bajorans today are 0.2 points stronger on average than they were at the end of the Decipher Era, but Hirogen have lost the exact same amount of STRENGTH and an equal amount of CUNNING. On the whole, there's not a lot of affiliation drift since the Decipher Era, and it tends to cancel out.
The exception is Starfleet, which lost a full 0.6 INTEGRITY, 0.2 CUNNING, and 0.1 STRENGTH in the CC Era. But remember that Decipher Starfleet consisted solely of the all-stars in the Enterprise Collection, so that's not surprising. Suddenly Starfleet gained universals, so of course their averages dropped.
Speaking of the universal/unique distinction, what difference does it make? Answer: not much! Unique personnel (including enigmas) average 5.9/7.3/6.3 = 19.5. So uniques are basically 6/7/6 on average. Universals are definitely weaker, clocking in at 5.6/6.4/6.2 = 18.2. But I honestly expected more of a gap. Again, this is exactly the same today as it was in Decipher Times.
(You may argue: well, hey, maybe the CC just hasn't made enough cards to affect the long-term averages yet! But we have. Decipher produced 1194 Personnel cards, and the CC has produced 666. Not a majority, not by a long shot, but enough to leave a mark if we had moved away from Decipher standards.)
How about affiliations? I made a chart (sorted by average total attribute points, left to right):
So our league champions are and . Not a big shock, given their Giant Fists Of Punching. Bit surprising they came off so well on INTEGRITY, but we'll talk more about that later.
The losers, nobody will probably be surprised to learn, are and , who are so bad at this that their affiliation averages are actually worse than the averages for universal personnel. Oh dear!
The median performers are the . Good solid work, Rommies.
Now let's look at the individual attributes. First, INTEGRITY:
This seems intuitively about right. There are, of course, a couple of schools of thought about what INTEGRITY means, but, no matter how you construe it, it seems right that lead the league table (in that exact order), and are at the other end. Decipher designed to be good at INTEGRITY (that's why INTEGRITY is colored blue on the cards), and that seems to have held up.
On the other hand... the lowest average INTEGRITY in the game is just under 5. The friggin' KCA has an average INTEGRITY of 5.2, and the INTEGRITY gap between KCA and Alpha Quadrant Klingons is only 0.6 points. Does that feel right to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like there should be a little more affiliation flavor on display here -- that there should be more of a difference between honor-bound AQ Klingons and their evil, treacherous doppelgangers.
Next, I'm going to skip over to STRENGTH:
This also looks pretty right. / / AQ / on top (in that order), with / again at the bottom, followed by / / . That all tracks with my TrekSense.
There's a little more variance between affiliations here, too: the lowest STRENGTH affiliations still have surprisingly high STRENGTH for weak races (the lowest, Vidiian, is just barely under 5), but the strong affiliations really are strong (in the 7-8 RANGE), which makes for a little more of a separation between different affiliations, and a little more STRENGTH-based flavor.
Finally, CUNNING:
...well, this one is not so great, is it?
Although Decipher designed CUNNING as a strength (again, that's why it's green), somehow the has taken top honors here, and it's not immediately obvious to me why that should be. True, are in second place... but second-place is a four-way exact tie between Rom, Vulc, Fed, and (weirdly) Non-Aligned. Hirogen is only a tenth of a point away from making it a five-way tie. The whole chart is nearly flat. Overall, barely a point separates the most CUNNING affiliation ([Dom] = 7.4) from the least ([Bor] = 6.2), and more than two-thirds of all affiliations are within just a half-point of the top CUNNING honors.
So basically every affiliation has almost the same CUNNING, with very little variance. This renders CUNNING kind of pointless as an affiliation flavor tool -- and kinda steals some thunder from the really CUNNING races of Star Trek, namely and (I'll even give you ) while allowing canonically less CUNNING races (like and ) to avoid what should be a somewhat irritating penalty. (It would counterbalance their STRENGTH bonus, which is somewhat irritating to their opponents!)
CUNNING, then, is an area for potential improvement.
With these stats in hand, though, we can finally see objectively where attributes are at (on average) and which affiliations are good at which ones. Ideally, to my mind, each affiliation should have a good attribute, a bad attribute, and an okay attribute (as Decipher did in Premiere for the original three affiliations) and we should build toward that, in order to enhance this element of affiliation flavor... but that was very difficult when nobody even knew what the overall average attributes in the game were. Now that data is here, and I think it's nifty. Hopefully you enjoyed this, too.
My raw data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
EDIT: This data excludes 2EBC and reprints. Variable and "NO" attributes are treated as zero. It also -- weirdly enough -- excludes the second personnel on each dual personnel. "6+X" was interpreted as 6; Rayva is counted as having 17 total attributes.
But I have database access and it seems criminal not to use it for the good of the community, so I did some research and now I know some stuff.
Here are the broadest takeaways:
The average personnel is 6/7/6 for a total of 19 attribute points. (Actually 5.8/7.0/6.3 = 19.1, but decimals are hard.)
There's a lot of variance in there. Standard deviation is 1.8 for INTEGRITY, 1.5 for CUNNING, and 2.1 for STRENGTH, or 3.1 for total attributes combined. Which means everyone with as few as 16 total attributes and as many as 22 attributes is within the game's broad middle, within one standard deviation of average.
(I have no idea whether this data is normally distributed or skewed. My bet is skewed. I didn't check.) Of course, we have to keep making people on both sides of that line in order to keep it there, or escalation will happen.
That said, we've done a pretty good job of preventing personnel attribute escalation over time!
In PAQ (1994-1996), the average personnel was 5.8/6.8/5.7 = 18.5, and stayed there in FC/DS9.
Decipher turned up the heat a bit in the Golden Age (5.7/7.2/6.7 = 19.5), but this is just about the only thing that DIDN'T escalate in VOY/HA (5.8/7.2/6.4 = 19.5). Attributes held steady for the rest of the Decipher era.
When the CC took over, we actually lowered the temperature back to the PAQ/FC/DS9-era. In each two-year period from 2009-2017, we consistently stayed between 18.6 and 18.8 total attributes on average (generally 5/7/6).
But things started heating up a bit in 2019, when we cracked the 19 average total attributes barrier for the first time since the Golden Age, and we've continued that pattern. The 2020-2021 period (which, to be fair, is not yet complete) saw the highest average total attributes in the history of the game: 5.8/7.2/7.1 = 20.1. Something to keep an eye on!
For the most part, though, we've done well. I honestly expected to see more attribute inflation in the CC era, especially in individual affiliations. But there's not much of that. Sure, Bajorans today are 0.2 points stronger on average than they were at the end of the Decipher Era, but Hirogen have lost the exact same amount of STRENGTH and an equal amount of CUNNING. On the whole, there's not a lot of affiliation drift since the Decipher Era, and it tends to cancel out.
The exception is Starfleet, which lost a full 0.6 INTEGRITY, 0.2 CUNNING, and 0.1 STRENGTH in the CC Era. But remember that Decipher Starfleet consisted solely of the all-stars in the Enterprise Collection, so that's not surprising. Suddenly Starfleet gained universals, so of course their averages dropped.
Speaking of the universal/unique distinction, what difference does it make? Answer: not much! Unique personnel (including enigmas) average 5.9/7.3/6.3 = 19.5. So uniques are basically 6/7/6 on average. Universals are definitely weaker, clocking in at 5.6/6.4/6.2 = 18.2. But I honestly expected more of a gap. Again, this is exactly the same today as it was in Decipher Times.
(You may argue: well, hey, maybe the CC just hasn't made enough cards to affect the long-term averages yet! But we have. Decipher produced 1194 Personnel cards, and the CC has produced 666. Not a majority, not by a long shot, but enough to leave a mark if we had moved away from Decipher standards.)
How about affiliations? I made a chart (sorted by average total attribute points, left to right):
So our league champions are and . Not a big shock, given their Giant Fists Of Punching. Bit surprising they came off so well on INTEGRITY, but we'll talk more about that later.
The losers, nobody will probably be surprised to learn, are and , who are so bad at this that their affiliation averages are actually worse than the averages for universal personnel. Oh dear!
The median performers are the . Good solid work, Rommies.
Now let's look at the individual attributes. First, INTEGRITY:
This seems intuitively about right. There are, of course, a couple of schools of thought about what INTEGRITY means, but, no matter how you construe it, it seems right that lead the league table (in that exact order), and are at the other end. Decipher designed to be good at INTEGRITY (that's why INTEGRITY is colored blue on the cards), and that seems to have held up.
On the other hand... the lowest average INTEGRITY in the game is just under 5. The friggin' KCA has an average INTEGRITY of 5.2, and the INTEGRITY gap between KCA and Alpha Quadrant Klingons is only 0.6 points. Does that feel right to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like there should be a little more affiliation flavor on display here -- that there should be more of a difference between honor-bound AQ Klingons and their evil, treacherous doppelgangers.
Next, I'm going to skip over to STRENGTH:
This also looks pretty right. / / AQ / on top (in that order), with / again at the bottom, followed by / / . That all tracks with my TrekSense.
There's a little more variance between affiliations here, too: the lowest STRENGTH affiliations still have surprisingly high STRENGTH for weak races (the lowest, Vidiian, is just barely under 5), but the strong affiliations really are strong (in the 7-8 RANGE), which makes for a little more of a separation between different affiliations, and a little more STRENGTH-based flavor.
Finally, CUNNING:
...well, this one is not so great, is it?
Although Decipher designed CUNNING as a strength (again, that's why it's green), somehow the has taken top honors here, and it's not immediately obvious to me why that should be. True, are in second place... but second-place is a four-way exact tie between Rom, Vulc, Fed, and (weirdly) Non-Aligned. Hirogen is only a tenth of a point away from making it a five-way tie. The whole chart is nearly flat. Overall, barely a point separates the most CUNNING affiliation ([Dom] = 7.4) from the least ([Bor] = 6.2), and more than two-thirds of all affiliations are within just a half-point of the top CUNNING honors.
So basically every affiliation has almost the same CUNNING, with very little variance. This renders CUNNING kind of pointless as an affiliation flavor tool -- and kinda steals some thunder from the really CUNNING races of Star Trek, namely and (I'll even give you ) while allowing canonically less CUNNING races (like and ) to avoid what should be a somewhat irritating penalty. (It would counterbalance their STRENGTH bonus, which is somewhat irritating to their opponents!)
CUNNING, then, is an area for potential improvement.
With these stats in hand, though, we can finally see objectively where attributes are at (on average) and which affiliations are good at which ones. Ideally, to my mind, each affiliation should have a good attribute, a bad attribute, and an okay attribute (as Decipher did in Premiere for the original three affiliations) and we should build toward that, in order to enhance this element of affiliation flavor... but that was very difficult when nobody even knew what the overall average attributes in the game were. Now that data is here, and I think it's nifty. Hopefully you enjoyed this, too.
My raw data is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
EDIT: This data excludes 2EBC and reprints. Variable and "NO" attributes are treated as zero. It also -- weirdly enough -- excludes the second personnel on each dual personnel. "6+X" was interpreted as 6; Rayva is counted as having 17 total attributes.
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~Iron Prime
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime