so you went there, signed up, and posted the first message after 3 weeks saying austria and italy are awesome? you're learned well! soon you will be trolling me.

Austria and Italy are awesome. They're like Yoshi in smash brothers. Top tier, but requiring practice and skill.

except that if you look at top-level competition in sb you see people with those characters winning at decent levels. but if you look at the stats on diplomacy at the highest levels, a/i lose just as frequently as in lower-tier play. particularly italy.

I have seen the sb top tier stats. Care to point me to the diplomacy top tier stats? As I understand it, the solo average in general is around 8 or 9%, with France being a bit higher and Italy and Austria being a bit lower, but all within a statistically insignificant margin.

bolshoi you are confusing me. Now you start posting legitimate truths and ideas? How am I going to automatically ridicule everything you state when it is true?

Here are some statistics from a credible source, http://www.diplom.org/Zine/F2006M/Burton/DP_F2006M_best_powers.htm

Of course France has a better tactical situation than Italy, but the difference only becomes large in no-press games, since a good player can compensate with good diplomacy.

I had no idea it exists...

Interesting statistics, a little lower than I remember, and it appears the numbers are still statistically insignificant in full press.

This doesn't address the comparison I drew though to top tier players. Anyone know if there are stats only on >100 GR games? Or maybe even just on the tournaments?

lets move all the trolling on webdip... (think of patrick the starfish here) to r/diplomacy.

But seriously, 9gag is much better.

oh yes 27% vs 39% win/draw austria vs france or 4.6% vs 7.5% wins italy vs france is not of any statistical significance at all. i hope you aren't the same people who told me how it's statistically proven that the earth has warmed in the past decade.

the earth has warmed in the past century, by like 1.5 degrees...

about the stastics. the game has developed. 2 years ago I thought Turkey was invincible, I would always do well when I played them, and always feared him when I didn't. However over the last year I have seen Austria get significantly better to Turkey's expense.

I now think Germany is the strongest, but I doubt that will last either. If someone comes up with a good strategy in this game, it will eventually be counted as people adapt. Thats why I think this game is virtually balanced. Since some teams have win streaks and looose streaks.

What it comes town to is the psyche of the players and the alliances they make at the beginning of the game.

@bolshi id be careful in simply stating that simply a 3% difference implies no statistical significance. In fact, smaller numbers can have statistical significance if theyre even 1% apart. In fact, id be willing to bet that the 3% shown here is a significant difference.

The way I read those numbers, A France in S01 can be over fifty percent more confident in a win than his Southern neighbor can.

Power rankings:

1. Turkey
1a. France
3. Russia
4. England
5. Austria
6. Italy
7. Germany

there's a ridic gap between 1/1a and the rest though, think like LSU-Alabama in football this year

Nah its (IMO):
1. Germany
2. Russia
3. France
4. Austria
5. England
6. Italy
7. Turkey

so the gap between 1 and 1a is huge? like the game

Not even close.

1. France
2. Turkey
3. Italy
4. England
5. Russia
6. German
7. Austria

In the hands of a skilled player, Italy is very dangerous and much stronger than it would appear.

There's no point to giving ratings as if they were fact. In my personal opinion it's:
1. France
7a. Russia
7b. Turkey
7c. England
7 . Austria
7e. Italy
7f. Germany
but that's just me. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.

wow this is funny i just posted my rankings to another thread and here i see everyone is posting rankings. well these are the official bolshoi rankings
1. england - 2. russia - 3. france - 4. italy - 5. turkey - 6. germany - 7. austria
maybe if i were better with turkey it'd be higher. i feel like it should be higher from what people say, but i keep losing with it.

Sorry, those are wrong, thanks for playing.

"There's no point to giving ratings as if they were fact."

It's a fact that our rankings are correct and bolshoivik's are wrong.

Yeah, all ratings are a matter of opinion except for ERFITGA, which is just wrong. Everybody knows that.

ghug has it perfect. Except I would put Russia at 7f, if only because I suck at Russia.

Turkey is overrated, note that its on the bottom of my list...

you ranked italy over england, so you have no authority to tell anyone what the rankings should be.

Bolshoi, you are either an idiot or a troll, you can't possibly tell if that is a statistically signifigant difference unless you know how many games have been counted.

For example if you only count 1 game then most countries will have a 0% win rate, but that isn't statistically signifigant. The error i believe in that case is the entire range of possible values.

If you happened to pick a game where there was a solo the error would be 100% which means there is an overlap between the 0% and 100% results (ie they are too close to call) but if you had a hundred million games and one country had a 99.999% win rate then that would be a pretty signifigant result, statistically speaking...
The difference between these two examples is a piece of info you didn't take into account.

In a random process the error in a count is the square root of the count, so if you count 1 game there is an error of 1; if you only count 100 wins then you error is +/- 10 wins (which is ten percent of your wins) if i'm not mistaken...

(@2ndwl)

Muting

@orthaic, it says out of 4500 full press games you knob.

and what do you mean by the error count? is that oral's error count? you can define your confidence level however you want, but you can't just say the error is 10. that's retarded.

Bolshoi, you've already proven to be utterly horrible at math. You were right about the differences being significant, so please just stop before you make a fool of yourself.

Okay, I crunched the numbers on the full press data.

For soloing: Germany and England are below 0.1 std. Turkey is below 0.2 std. Austria is a -0.52 std from the mean, while France is almost 1.0 std. Italy and Russia both exceed 1.5 std in opposite directions, but all data falls within 2 std.

For draw/solo: It is France instead of Russia exceeding 1.5 std, with Austria at -1.3 std. Everyone else falls below 1.0 std, with the notable case of Russia who is less than 0.2 std from the mean.

This is not the data I was purporting would substantiate my claim that Italy and Austria just take practice, but I withdraw my early off-the-cuff comment about the numbers being statistically insignificant. In my hasty look, I allowed myself to forget that statistical significance is more than proximity of numbers.