Slitherine

nikgaukroger wrote:

azrael86 wrote:

jlopez wrote:[
The issue with themes is that most players only have one, possibly two armies.

Really? I find that quite surprising, although the plethora of themes and books undoubtedly forms something of a barrier to new players.

Spain is a low wage economy for Europe - toy soldiers cost relatively more there than, say, GB or the US.

Most people earn around 1000 euros after tax so money is a factor especially as a lot of players don't paint their own.

shadowdragon wrote:

philqw78 wrote:

jlopez wrote: I recently suggested something similar for FOG and...wait a minute...there's a crowd outside my house and they seem to be piling faggots.

Homophobic as well then? Or is that homothropic if they are piling them??????

You do like to walk on the wild side, eh, Phil? Or is that just the pachyderm jeans...er, genes...ah, sorry! Forgot about the semi-naked part.

I just knew somebody would come up with a comment like that...

I thought it was a little more agile than a "bundle of sticks and branches bound together". Never mind.

Was talking to Shaun Drummond at the weekend, he reckons to win in the antipodes you need to win all your games. They now use the same scoring system as us I believe, but used to do +100 for routing the enemy which has given them a culture of going for the big wins it seems. Over here 3 big wins and 3 decent winning draws will usually do it for a 6 game comp.

jlopez wrote:

shadowdragon wrote:

philqw78 wrote:Homophobic as well then? Or is that homothropic if they are piling them??????

You do like to walk on the wild side, eh, Phil? Or is that just the pachyderm jeans...er, genes...ah, sorry! Forgot about the semi-naked part.

I just knew somebody would come up with a comment like that...

I thought it was a little more agile than a "bundle of sticks and branches bound together". Never mind.

You too...er, et tu, Julian?

BTW, for your group I suggest a new motto....Win or Lose, go BIG or go home. No connection to bundles of sticks and branches!

jlopez wrote:

philqw78 wrote:

jlopez wrote: I recently suggested something similar for FOG and...wait a minute...there's a crowd outside my house and they seem to be piling faggots.

Homophobic as well then? Or is that homothropic if they are piling them??????

I just knew somebody would come up with a comment like that...

I thought it was a little more agile than a "bundle of sticks and branches bound together". Never mind.

Fascines would have been a less targetable word, relative to wargaming and still used by Engineers to fill holes.
(double entendres are so hard....... to avoid). Of course you can use faggots to make a bumfire.


I'll get my coat

philqw78 wrote:I'll get my coat

Good thing you've moved from naked to semi-naked, eh?

philqw78 wrote: Fascines would have been a less targetable word, relative to wargaming and still used by Engineers to fill holes.
(double entendres are so hard....... to avoid). Of course you can use faggots to make a bumfire.


I'll get my coat

Indeed, I've always had my suspicions about Engineers.

What was this topic about by the way? Anyone?

shadowdragon wrote:
You too...er, et tu, Julian?

BTW, for your group I suggest a new motto....Win or Lose, go BIG or go home. No connection to bundles of sticks and branches!

Quite. I don't mind getting crushed or winning but I just can't be asked with watching someone use every trick in the book to avoid combat for three hours. I've got to the stage where I may just take a LRR with all elite and superior legionnaries, an IC, three TCs and fortifications to protect the lot. Then I'll make the Fabius emulators sit there for three hours and do nothing or concede defeat. My only fear is that this tactic may become popular...I mean, just imagine! 10 points per game, guaranteed!

I've done my own analysis on the Britcon armies - it isn't as mathematically impressive as the works that have preceded me, but it is also not open to question.

There wer 78 armies at Britcon (early, late, loonies and 25mm) of which 8 were above 15 BG's. There were some swarm armies, there were some light horse armies, there were some Longbow armies, there were even some heavy foot armies.

Or to put another way - a nice mix. So it would appear there isn't a problem in the UK.

Julian, perhaps the Spanish ancient players just like grumbling!

jlopez wrote:They used the standard 6-1 system but found that too many players preferred to lose 3-4 by bumping off a couple of enemy platoons than risk a 6-1 defeat by actually going for the objective. As a result we now use the 1-0 system where you get one point for completing the mission irrespective of losses, ties are sorted using the 6-1 system. As a result players are being more aggressive.

I recently suggested something similar for FOG and...wait a minute...there's a crowd outside my house and they seem to be piling faggots.

It does sound like player attitude may be the issue. I am not sure what you are going to do to change that I am afraid.

jlopez wrote:

Spain is a low wage economy for Europe - toy soldiers cost relatively more there than, say, GB or the US.
Most people earn around 1000 euros after tax so money is a factor especially as a lot of players don't paint their own.

Surely toy soldiers cost broadly the same anywhere, there is this thing called the Internet as I understand it.

You can't have it both ways! If you're going to have your armies propainted you can hardly plead poverty. You could have three/four times as many figures instead. And at three feet a pike block is a pike block however well it's painted.

shadowdragon wrote: I was thinking about this too as the choice of BG is conditional on the choice of army (or is it the other way around? ) which complicates things as we now have to separate the influence of army from BG size from the data. I suppose if someone paid you money to do it one could set up controlled experiments with a sampling of armies , same set of players with armies designed with large / small BG's but that'd be no fun unless it was a lot of money.

I don't think it would be possible to take factors out like this without an enormous amount of work. There are so many possible influences, from army choice to game time (as Hammy has mentioned, also the first Britcon game is variable and upto 6 hours long!). There are, however, two known variables, number of BGs and score. Whether they are related is another matter.

shadowdragon wrote: I wouldn't expect normal distributions in general since a number of things are conditional (e.g., game designed to suit a particular range of BG, influence of army type on numbers of BG, prior success with a particular army, etc.) and not independent.

It's a reasonable first hypothesis to make (before I plotted the data) that game scores for all army sizes would be normally distributed around 10, but only if you take the +5s away. But I had no expectation it would be true; for <=11 in the Italian results it would seem to be an exponential distribution.

shadowdragon wrote: That’s understandable, but, as I’m sure you know, that means there’d be less confidence in the results for the bins with lower numbers….add to that the possibility of fewer army choices in those bins.

No, that's something separate. The normalisation I did was purely a presentation technique, it's not affecting any analyses one might do.

shadowdragon wrote: That’s understandable – see “lots of money” statement above. One of things I’d consider doing is a principle component analysis using a variety of factors (e.g., like the suggested fields above). However, I think the bigger issue is player perception and enjoyment. If people are really concerned about this as an issue feedback surveys are an idea…at least in Spain.

PCA or any other multi-variate analysis would be a bit of overkill! Start with the basics first.

Surveys and the like are qualitative analysis... there's a rough form of it here...

shadowdragon wrote: Yes, I did use linear regression but I did not mean to imply the relationship was linear. I only had the graph above to work with and just wanted to get an idea of the trend. Estimating a trend and de-trending data is, for example, a common practice with something like Fourier analyses – but that certainly doesn’t imply linear relationships. And, yes, the +5 should be removed first. I’m not sure if a normal distribution is right. There could be “fat tails” as a result of the factors you mention that skew results or because of changes in time with changing experience, preferences, etc. of the community.

Not sure why you'd detrend then, as it's a time series analysis technique. This isn't a time series, except in the vague sense the Italian meetings are sampled at discrete times.

azrael86 wrote:Surely toy soldiers cost broadly the same anywhere, there is this thing called the Internet as I understand it.

But food doesn't, accommodation doesn't so wages are different. So as a percentage of wage lead soldiers cost more. If you are in Spain you could pay a Spaniard to paint them, for less than Mr Crozier by a long way I dare say. (but they wouldn't be as good)

azrael86 wrote:

jlopez wrote:

Spain is a low wage economy for Europe - toy soldiers cost relatively more there than, say, GB or the US.
Most people earn around 1000 euros after tax so money is a factor especially as a lot of players don't paint their own.

Surely toy soldiers cost broadly the same anywhere, there is this thing called the Internet as I understand it.

You can't have it both ways! If you're going to have your armies propainted you can hardly plead poverty. You could have three/four times as many figures instead. And at three feet a pike block is a pike block however well it's painted.

Patience, dedication and the ability to sit still for more than five minutes are not qualities that predominate amongst my fellow spaniards hence the preference for professionally painted armies. It's also another reason for the shift to FOW, the games are about an hour shorter.

jlopez wrote:Patience, dedication and the ability to sit still for more than five minutes are not qualities that predominate amongst my fellow spaniards .

Unless playing FoG it seems

jlopez wrote:Patience, dedication and the ability to sit still for more than five minutes are not qualities that predominate amongst my fellow spaniards.

Except when they are "working"....

hammy wrote:

jlopez wrote:They used the standard 6-1 system but found that too many players preferred to lose 3-4 by bumping off a couple of enemy platoons than risk a 6-1 defeat by actually going for the objective. As a result we now use the 1-0 system where you get one point for completing the mission irrespective of losses, ties are sorted using the 6-1 system. As a result players are being more aggressive.

I recently suggested something similar for FOG and...wait a minute...there's a crowd outside my house and they seem to be piling faggots.

It does sound like player attitude may be the issue. I am not sure what you are going to do to change that I am afraid.

In the US some tournaments grant +2 points to the winner to deal with this as some armies just bleed platoons on the way to victory. It does sound like player attitude. If you are going to lose what does it matter if it is 1 point or 3 points? Only getting 5 or 6 points per game will win you the tourney.

peterrjohnston wrote: It's a reasonable first hypothesis to make (before I plotted the data) that game scores for all army sizes would be normally distributed around 10, but only if you take the +5s away. But I had no expectation it would be true; for <=11 in the Italian results it would seem to be an exponential distribution.

Agree with all of that.

peterrjohnston wrote: PCA or any other multi-variate analysis would be a bit of overkill!

Just trying to frighten the troops. As you can see above, I didn’t.

peterrjohnston wrote: Not sure why you'd detrend then, as it's a time series analysis technique. This isn't a time series, except in the vague sense the Italian meetings are sampled at discrete times.

Sorry for confusing you here. That was just meant as an example of using linear regression when the underlying function isn’t necessarily linear.

All I did was to use a quick method to check on whether or not the series had trends. If low BG armies don’t win a lot one would expect a downward trend (i.e. for something like a monotonically decreasing function or one that’s nearly so) with the score even if the distribution / function isn’t linear – which is what we see with your data (for the low BG serices) but less so with hammy’s data.

Anyway, it only confirmed my suspicion that a lot of posters have their minds made up and look for evidence to confirm their bias…which was my (secret or not so secret) hypothesis. 

peterrjohnston wrote:All I did was to use a quick method to check on whether or not the series had trends. If low BG armies don’t win a lot one would expect a downward trend (i.e. for something like a monotonically decreasing function or one that’s nearly so) with the score even if the distribution / function isn’t linear – which is what we see with your data (for the low BG serices) but less so with hammy’s data.

Some interesting analysis but I should point out that on the Britcon data FoG4 is 25mm and only 650 points. As a result you cannot compare the FoG4 results with the others.

shadowdragon wrote: Just trying to frighten the troops. As you can see above, I didn’t.

I suspect we're having a private conversation here.

shadowdragon wrote: Anyway, it only confirmed my suspicion that a lot of posters have their minds made up and look for evidence to confirm their bias…which was my (secret or not so secret) hypothesis.

If I have time, I'll look at the Italian results in more detail, rather the quick and dirty analysis I did. Particularly something akin to what you were looking at above. Unfortunately, as you say, I don't think anyone will take a blind bit of notice, nor, indeed, care. Like a far more important problem in today's world, the sceptical viewpoint is very attractive as it avoids having to think about the difficult problem of what should be done. Which can be summarised as shooting the messenger