When only looking at solos Turkey performs consistantly better than France - full press 18% vs 16%, public press (sample size only 365 games, not really fair but) 24% vs 16%, gunboat 24% vs 18%.

Russia does better than turkey in full press but worse than france in gunboat, so i've ignored it. (this is all based on 17,573 webdip games)

It seems Turkey does much better, than anyone else, most of the time. Is that an experience that players share? I would propose that it is the defensive position which helps so much in gunboat, you can't beat turkey without help and gunboat makes finding a solid alliance much harder. But even in full press games Turkey seems to do very well (though apparently the advantage of being hard to kill is less useful than Russia's ability to talk... )

France meanwhile performs strongly consistently but talking definitely balances out it's inherent advantages. But what advantage does France have? Good growth or easily despatched enemies? Some combination, or just the lack of a specific threat of removal because nobody has enough to gain from directly attacking france?

I'd love to see stats which only include the top 100 / 1000 GR rated players (all-time ratings) - that is, not the actual results of games they've played in, but their results...which could total a higher than 100% win (combined) rate...