The "survey" doesn't even make sense....

I love the completely subjective and open-ended question at the end "What do you think is the strongest strategy?" with a just a tiny little reply box.

1. Learn to spell. You're copying off a map, so it can't be that hard.
2. Figure out how to use a Likert scale.
3. Define importance.
4. Don't bother with the red asterisk if you make every question "required."
5. Stevastopol would be an awesome nickname for someone named Steve.

I also didn't fill out the survey due to the absurd length and the incredible difficulty of trying to put every single territory on a 1-10 importance scale.

However, I do think the most important territories are Munich, Tunis, St. Petersburg. Those three tend to play a major role in the end game, in the rush to establish one of the standard stalemate lines. The timing and race toward possessing those three often makes the difference between winning, losing or drawing.

I haven't filled it in either. You'd be better off asking for the 5 most important territories to take/hold/defend and why (BlS, AeS, IoS, MAO, NtS: because of the territories they can attack/support and, for IoS and MAO, the blocking of movement through them).

Why don't you do what everyone else does in school projects and make up the results?

Aside from the comments mentioned above, you should also think about replacing the "How good do you think you are" question with, something along the lines of GR ranking range: 1-50, 51-100 etc etc. That will give you something that vaguly resembles useful data on how good the person is instead of the size of their ego (which for many top players is surprisingly small).

By the way, the strongest strategy is to form an alliance to advance yourself to a strong position, and then stab your ally(s) to win the game. This, coincidently, is the only strategy. The skill is in how you tweak the strategy to fit the circumstances you find yourself in.

There are other strategies - but they don't result in a solo; you can form a draw alliance and prevent anyone else from solo-ing. This is a game where you can decide how to play and what you count as success, if not victory...

It is assumed that everyone plays for fun, so you might consider asking 'what strategy is the most fun?'

Some will say making friends and allies, others will say making an interesting set of moves (and convincing others to go along with them) while still others may prefer to screw people over regardless of who solos because of their actions...

Trolls gonna troll.

@ Ora

Fair enough. If you don't want to win their are a variety of interesting strategies that will result in new and interesting ways of losing the game. I would argue that most draws are a result of where the core strategy meets with circumstances where stabbing your ally simply wouldn't work, rather than someone simply starting a game with drawing in mind. At least I hope that's the case. There are an awful lot of boring miserable people about if not :p

@ Hecks

I admit I was briefly tempted to give 10 to every territory that wasn't in France. Alas, who has the time?

Oh... not including Belguim, obviously

So, I filled this out honestly, then looked at the results. Not surprisingly, so far, consensus seems to say North Sea is the most strategically important territory in the game, with 42% of respondents giving it a 10/10. Clyde is the least respected territory, with 39% of people giving it a 1/10. Surprisingly, Syria is way down there, too, with 33% giving it a 1/10. No love for the Lepanto?

I would give 10 to everything and write Fuck You in the blank box but it would be too much work. U Krane man?

That was my same procedure for filling out course evaluations in college.

They are called flash surveys for a reason. One moment they sit in your received mail and the next they don't.

If I were to compile this survey, I would just ask for the most important territories, perhaps including separate lists for land and sea.

To offer you MY opinion, here are my short lists, three apiece, and in no particular order:

Portugal, Galicia, Ukraine.
North Sea, Ionian Sea, Mid-Atlantic.

But truth be told, the importance of most provinces varies depending upon whether you see them mostly as buffer zones (Helgoland Bight, Bohemia, Switzerland), opportunities for guessing-games (Eastern Mediterranean), or control of early supply-center grabs (Black Sea, Skagerrak).

I chose mine based on connectivity to other provinces. Portugal and MAO stalemate Gibraltar. Ukraine and Galicia are the keys to eastern Europe. Ionian Sea, or really the boundary between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, defines control of the Mediterranean much how the North Sea defines control on the other half of the board.

Legitimate question: is it the Helgoland Bight or Heligoland Bight? WebDip spells it Heligoland, others as Helgoland, is there a correct spelling or are both accurate?

If your descent traces to perfidious Albion, you can say Heligoland but all the cool Germanic kids say Helgoland.

Thank you guys so much for the help! The results are here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_Il31Ql0sIWCqYOPfRwTZNZw9U5sPpPiOpbY_z9p5CA/viewanalytics

If anyone knows how to set it up so that I can take an excel sheet with the data and code a color based map from it, please let me know. Just for some context, this is for a required course at my school called Ezine. In this class we work in groups to create a magazine by the end of the semester. Our magazine is called Reason (It is about formal and informal logic), and I am writing two articles on diplomacy.

I know the idea of rating each country is kind of arbitrary, but (almost) all of us know that the black sea is normally more important than Clyde is. I need to be able to quantify the value of each territory in order to do a thematic map, and this is the only way I could think of doing that. If anyone knows how to find archives on the amount of time units spend on each land territory, I would like a link to that information. I am also sorry that the survey is kind of long... this is the only way I can make a thematic map out of this information. Thanks again for everything.

@korn: Probably a better proxy for a territory's importance is the number of times units were dislodged from the territory, or the number of times units were stood out of that territory. You should probably also tinker with some factor for convoys across seas; this would heighten the apparent value of BLA, ION, and NTH even though they don't change hands very often.

Yorkshire should not look like a pivotal territory if it were simply where an army were kept after repeatedly being bounced out of its destinations when England tried to convoy to Belgium, Holland, or Denmark. Scoring by occupation alone would cause problems with this sort of issue.

Hey Korn,

I am just reading a nice book to motivate me writing my thesis. It is about organizing creativity. One phrase in particular struck me there: "Incompetent people don't ask for help TO DO it but either none at all or for solutions". It so happens that your last post somehow perfectly matches this phrase.

I don't know what your thematic map should reflect or what you did besides that, but the following approach might have been better:

1. know yourself what a strategy is (it is not some vague concept of winning, but some well defined "set of actions maximising utility over any other sets of action" – this sure is game theory, but what else is Diplomacy than a game?). you could have then framed your strategy question better on subsequent levels (play always truthful, tit for tat – which tends to work best in purely rational environments, only beatable by "meta-gaming", and serves as a nice test for the rationality of players – always lie, stab after x-moves, stab if your ally is 2-times stronger than you, …). That you didn't get many strategies in your answers should be a warning.

2. If you were interested in measuring the importance of territories, define in what light. And then go and measure it by your own.
a) sample a set of games (for a pretest 10 should be sufficient, for an actual survey, probably 100 will do)
b) measure how many times a territory has been occupied by the winner, how many times it has been occupied by units, how many times it has been fought over, changed belonging, etc… you'll probably finding something that is necessary, if you thought about it.
c) find something to correlate your measurements against, like occupation vs. number of connections in on turn or two turns, distance from supply centers, etc… there is enough.
d) THEN, take a survey, ask players how often they have played, how often they have won, how often drawn, and what are their opinions about the top 5 most important territories…
e) check whether your somehow deductively generated importance measures and tests correlate with inductively generated estimates by players. Draw two maps if the results are interesting: How the players see the game, how the data sees the game…

3. Use the import/export function in googledocs to 1st: export the g-spreadsheet that has already and automatically collected the responses to your form to your computer (preferably as .xl…-file) and 2nd import the spreadsheet into excel (or directly into your mapping software). It takes up maybe 3 min to read it up completely in the googlehelp section and takes another 10 secs to execute the procedure. You could then enjoy much of your time analysing your results (which you should as it is rather complicated to rank the many views you received adequately as you have to account for the mean rank attributed AND the noise across the answers, if u were to truly find out something, you might like Aldrich and McKelvey 1977 to get an easy start. Also I wouldn't use excel, but that is because I suck in excel).

Thanks for the help! Do you know of a good mapping software I could use? Someone from Vdiplomacy gave me an algorithm that pradicts the value of territories, so I could make a second map with that for comparison.