Interpretting Statistics

[michaelHastriter]

What do the statistics
" forest 1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5
grassland 1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5
wetland 1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5 "

for each player mean?

[swilkiway]

I'm not the one who programmed it, so I'm not certain, but my guess is that each bird is part of an enum, and it gets averaged just like all the other stats. So while the other stats have a sensible numerical value when averaged, since they're supposed to be interpreted numerically, the ones you referred to make no sense because what's being averaged is just the numerical representation of the birds, which means nothing at all since there isn't a "bird scale" to help you interpret what you're seeing.

(If you're not a programmer and thus not familiar with what an enum is, here's an example (not in any particular programming language):
Enum bird {
Sparrow = "Sparrow"
Duck = "Duck",
Warbler = "Warbler"
}
So anytime you want to use the word "Sparrow", you can write bird.Sparrow instead. Why would you do that? Imagine your program outputs the word "Sparrow" in a lot of places. In each of those places, you could write the word "Sparrow" in the code-- but then if you realize you need to change it to say "sparrow" instead, you have to find everywhere that says Sparrow and change it to sparrow. However, if you use the enum, you can just change the enum's value so it's Sparrow = "sparrow", and then everywhere in the code will have the correct version without you finding every instance.

Each enum also assigns a numerical value to each entry-- sparrow would be 0, duck 1, and warbler 2, in this case-- and I expect that's what we're seeing with those nonsense statistics.

Sorry, long aside that may not actually be relevant, but now you know more about enums)

[paramesis]

I'm not the one who programmed it, so I'm not certain, but my guess is that each bird is part of an enum, and it gets averaged…

That is all exactly correct. The birds in each position on your boards are defined as an enum, which is displayed properly in the stats of an individual game, but the averages are completely useless. The same thing happens with the player faction stats in Terra Mystica.

In order to get at a higher level of insight from these stats, a process of extraction and active analysis would need to take place. An extraction function has not been set up for this implementation to my knowledge (that would be between the publisher, BGA, and whoever has access to the function to do the analysis).

[michaelHastriter]

It does seem that the stronger players play more birds in the grassland on average and also have higher values for grassland enum values for these statistics. Is it just taking the sum of all these enums and dividing by 100 or something? (there must be some division or floating point variables going one because there is a decimal number for all 15 of these statistics.

[paramesis]

On the contrary, a higher number in this average would signify a bird being less likely to be played in this spot. The base game birds are enumerated from 0 to 169 by common name in alphabetical order, and 999 is a null value. That’s why the averages for the fifth column are much higher than the first.