Early Age Civs

[JimMorrison]

Very very good input Endo, I very much agree with most of what you have suggested. Obviously, I won't be looking for quite so much detail, as the actual chart will be just that, a chart. Anyone can feel free to go into as much length and detail on any nation they wish, in their post, but ultimately the ratings are not meant to be a strategy guide, that's where someone would go after they narrow down their choice of nation through the statistics provided.


Regarding a 1-5 (or 1-3 as in Endo's last post), vs a 1-10, I think that the scale of 10 works better within the concept of averaging. Even going 1-10, I may feel compelled to add a decimal, but with 1-5 I would surely add a decimal place. Ultimately this just makes the number larger, I would be asking people to rate on 1-5, but then would extrapolate that to actually a rating between 10-50. One thing that I think is important, is that the chart is easy to visually scan for the particular facets that one is looking for in a new nation to play, so I really do think that a 1-10 scale will work better than a 10-50 scale, and also better than a table filled with text, especially if that table could end up with ratings like "weak/average", which might tend to make it wrap to the next line on these forums.

[Edratman]

JiMMorrison, your plan sounds very good and I like your thinking about numerical rating.

[Endoperez]

I think it's much easier for the REVIEWER to review on simple terms. It's up to the maker of the chart to make a good chart out of that.

"Very weak, weak, average, good, very good" would be better than the weak/average I used above. If I make a new thread where people can post their opinions of nations with this five-point scale, I think it could really catch on. I'll wait until you decide how, exactly, you would do the scoring.


Here's what I suggest. Just exploit the fact that 0 out of 10 is NEVER given. Even the worst games or movies will get 30 out of 100 or 2.5 out of ten or half a star out of 5. Five scores is still enough to calculate averages - 3 votes for strong and two for very strong gives nice 8.8 result.

Code:

---

Very weak  |  2

Weak       |  4

Average    |  6

Strong     |  8

Very strong|  10

---

This way, the lowest score any nation is likely to get in any single score would be slightly under 4. Ease of Use of 2.7 or whatever for Early Mictlan would be suitably bad. If it actually had a score of 0.8 or something, it would turn people off instead of just warning them. "Worse than Descent to the Undermountain? I'm not going to touch that!" etc.


Also, if we get a good discussion rolling AND we get the short summaries about the nation, it'll be a great addition to the StrategyWiki. We'll take the averages out of the chart, and add the comments about the various stages of game, and we have a short strategy guide and review.

[Zeldor]

But you would want to accept opinions only from people that played said nation or against in MP game till end-game.

[JimMorrison]

Well the caveat would be that I would prefer ratings from people who could at least rate say half the nations in one or more particular ages. This is to show a breadth of experience that enables one to reflect more adequately upon their experiences, rather than only being familiar with 3 nations, and rating them only relative to eachother (then it becomes another shallow "rankings" exercise).

As far the MP rating, I would definately prefer players who had at least completed 3-4 full games. Obviously it is best if some of those games they survived to the end, and even better if they've even won 1 or 2 of them.

There would obviously need to be some sort of oversight, using the pseudo-Olympic model, anyone whose scores deviate significantly across the board from everyone else, would likely be disregarded. Not to say that people can't disagree, but if someone seems to "disagree" with everyone else on everything, they are likely insane or just like to cause trouble.


I suppose Endo, you make a fairly good case for taking the numbers away from the submitters, to give them a clearer sense of what they are stating. Ultimately, the more contributors we get, the less accurate their rating needs to be in order to get an average that IS accurate. Though I think if I do so, I will use the designations of "Sad, Weak, Capable, Strong, Glorious". I don't know, maybe it's my sense of creativity that just prefers numbers for such things, words are so arbitrary, numbers always say what they mean.