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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#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):

Image

So our league champions are [Hir] and [Dom]. 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 [Fer] and [Vid], 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 [1E-Rom]. Good solid work, Rommies.

Now let's look at the individual attributes. First, INTEGRITY:

Image

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 [Fed] [SF] [Vul] [Baj] [Kli] lead the league table (in that exact order), and [Vid] [TE] [Rom] [Fer] are at the other end. Decipher designed [Fed] 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:

Image

This also looks pretty right. [Hir] / [Dom] / AQ [Kli] / [Kaz] on top (in that order), with [Vid] / [Fer] again at the bottom, followed by [Baj] / [Fed] / [SF]. 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:

Image

...well, this one is not so great, is it?

Although Decipher designed CUNNING as a [1E-Rom] strength (again, that's why it's green), somehow the [Dom] has taken top honors here, and it's not immediately obvious to me why that should be. True, [1E-Rom] 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 [Rom] and [Vul] (I'll even give you [Fer] ) while allowing canonically less CUNNING races (like [Kli] and [Kaz] ) 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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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#557920
This is wonderful! Love data like this. Makes it so much easier to show where the game needs to change and grow.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#557924
eberlems wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 6:33 pm Is this including reprints?
I excluded reprints* and 2EBC. All those Kiras alone would have thrown off the numbers!

*
Code: Select all
WHERE (firstprintID IS NULL OR firstprintID = 0 OR firstprintID = '')
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Retired Moderator
#557935
I heard Dorian Collins grew up spending all day in the basement torturing rats with a hacksaw and pulling the wings off of flies.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#557937
Takket wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 8:48 pm I see Dorian Collins doesn't even make it into the "standard deviation" range, that low integrity MONSTER.
So the "one standard deviation" thing means that, if attributes are normally distributed (a bunch in the middle with less on the left and less on the right, symmetrically), about 68% of cards will fall into that bucket. On the other hand, 32% of cards will fall outside that range.

95% of cards will fall within 2 standard deviations of normal (again, in a normal distribution, which our game might not have), and 99.7% will fall within 3 standard deviations. Anything over 2 standard deviations (in a normal distribution) is considered an outlier, in the most common definitions of outlier. (Though I prefer more stringent definitions.)

So Dorian is outside the broad middle, but not an outlier.

(INTEGRITY! MEANS! COMMITMENT! TO! PRINCIPLES! OTHERWISE! ITS! JUST! HONOR! AND WE ALREADY! HAVE! THAT! SKILL!)
 
By phaserihardlyknowher (Ben Daeuber)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#557939
BCSWowbagger wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 9:33 pm (INTEGRITY! MEANS! COMMITMENT! TO! PRINCIPLES! OTHERWISE! ITS! JUST! HONOR! AND WE ALREADY! HAVE! THAT! SKILL!)
What is honor, then? I've always wondered.

Which segues into my actual question, is there a similar analysis of skills? Which are most likely to overlap, do they correspond with attributes, etc.

P.S. once youre done explaining honor, someone can tell me the difference between Smuggling, Acquisition and Greed.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Regent
Community Contributor
#557941
Y'all really want to get me going on Dorian Collins again?

Really?

REALLY?!
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#557943
Well, of course, once I started laying down that kinda fire, I had no choice. Have some more stats, now on distributions. I did not break these down by affiliation, because it would have taken all night.

(However, Design, if you're ever working on a specific affiliation and want to know how your specific affiliation distributes INT/CUN/STR, hit me up. I saved the query and just have to add a filter.)

I wish I had excluded [Bor], because their attribute distribution is weird and presumably throws off everything else, but oh well too late.

I excluded all dual-affiliation personnel and variable attributes from this, out of sheer laziness, but I did translate "NO" as 0.

Okay, here we go:

Image

Our distribution is pretty close to normal. There's a lot of whole cards at 17 total attributes; I presume that's because every single Borg drone is a 17, and it's screwing up the otherwise remarkably symmetry of the chart.

Even with the Borg distortion, though, it looks like about 72% of our cards fall within one standard deviation of the norm, just a little more than you'd expect in a perfectly normal distribution. Exactly 95% of our cards fall within two standard deviations of normal, exactly as you'd expect. And 98.8% of our cards fall within 3 standard deviations, very close to expectations.

So total attributes are pretty normally distributed. Let's break this out by each attribute now.

Image

I call this "Apollo's Wall," because apparently the decision to make "God"'s requirement INTEGRITY>7 was very well-made, and has continued to be respected.

You'd hope to see this a little more normally distributed than it is, with the greatest number at 5 or 6 instead of 7, but at least there's some clear spread here.

Image

Not so much here in CUNNING land. Yeesh. Apparently we allow people to have a 6, a 7, or an 8, and that's kind of it, unless you REALLY justify it somehow. 77% of personnel in the game have a CUNNING of 6, 7, or 8.

So that's what a fairly normal distribution looks like when the standard deviation is only 1.4! I don't like it.

Lastly STRENGTH:

Image

Looks a lot like INTEGRITY, to be honest, but with a longer "tail" of 10+. (They call that "skew" in the stats biz, if I recall my college stats class correctly.)

Maybe we should have a talk about why this game hates the number 11, though? 10's great, 12's great, but 11 is a very rare attribute number. What's up with that? Charlie, I need a perfume salesman with 11/11/11, stat. It's for, um, rules purposes, ahem.

I'll go back and add these data to the original spreadsheet now (along with the excluded dual-personnel stats).
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Retired Moderator
#557944
BCSWowbagger wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 9:33 pm (INTEGRITY! MEANS! COMMITMENT! TO! PRINCIPLES! OTHERWISE! ITS! JUST! HONOR! AND WE ALREADY! HAVE! THAT! SKILL!)
The big problem though is that it might mean that NOW but Decipher has been less than consistent with it.

Otherwise, we have a whole ton of, say, PAQ Romulans whose scores indicate that they couldn't care less about the Empire with on-screen evidence either lacking or to the contrary.

But I suppose the counter argument to that is that PAQ was just weird and a lot about that era makes little sense now.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Regent
Community Contributor
#557945
Sirol and Dorian Collins are two sides of the same jacked up coin. At least Sirol has the excuse of being a PAQ era card....

And speaking of PAQ era attribute jacked-upedness, do we need to go any farther than Benjamin Maxwell and Norah Satie and their respective Integrity of 9 each?!
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#557946
Thanks for crunching these numbers. This is important stuff to think about. I'd be interested to see the affiliation averages weighted by number of copies of each personnel played in the past X months (ideally just OTF decks). (EDIT: Yes, that's number of copies total, not number of decks total. Not sure how easy it is process that info.) That'll show the extent to which affiliation attribute differences actually show up at game time.
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