For everyone who feels that diplomacy is rather unbalanced, especially looking at the win percentages I posted quite a while back, then this thread is for you.

I am in a research methods class that required me to analyze a series of data and draw up conclusions. I decided for this report to study how the opening moves in diplomacy (the S01/A01 moves) affect the chances of a country winning or losing. One of the interesting things that this report also uncovered is the relative balance among the 7 nations.

I took a sample of 200 games and studied the opening moves of the different countries and compared them with the other moves (a country's moves vs the other opening moves for the same country as well as the opening moves by other countries). What I found is that the countries are rather equal when examining the successes of the opening moves that produced the best results.

I also found that in games containing players of equal skill, the win percentages balance out more showing that Austria and Italy are rather equal to the other countries especially so when only looking at the average center gain for the openings that yielded the most favorable results. There was a slight favor to Russia and Turkey to some degree but the other 5 countries were all within a few percent success rate.

Below is a rough estimation of what I found:

Country:
win pct in equally matched games
most successful opening among those studied (avg center gain range)

Austria:
win pct: 14.5%
most successful opening: Balkan Gambit: Trieste Variation (4.5-6.75) and Galicia Variation (3.8-6.5)

England:
win pct: 12%
most successful opening: both Northern (4.75-5.9) and Southern (4.5-6.3) Openings were relatively equal

France:
win pct: 14%
most successful opening: didn't have one, all were equal (around 3.8-6.2)

Germany:
win pct: 8.5%
most successful opening: Blitzkrieg: Denmark Variation likely although this couldnt be guaranteed with 95% confidence (4.0-5.8)

Italy:
win pct: 9%
most successful opening: Tyrolia Attack (4.0-6.1)

Russia:
win pct: 21%
most successful opening: Southern Defense (5.3-7.8) and Austrian Attack (4.6-8.0) were rather equal
above the rest

Turkey:
win pct: 21%
most successful opening: Russian Attack (5.5-7.9) and Russian Defense (6.3-7.9) were rather equal above the rest

The reason for the difference in win percentages has to do with the number of reasonably successful openings available to a country. Russia, Turkey and France have more openings that tend to net a fair amount of centers in any given game and thus have a rise in win percentages even though the average centers per game for any given opening is relatively equal.

The last thing that I discovered is that (a) when compared to nonstandard openings, the standard openings really well and the nonstandard ones gained very little (except with France, suprisingly). A standard opening was any opening that was used in 10% or more of games played while nonstandard ones were openings played in less than 15% of games played. (b) that if a player screwed up their S01 moves by accidentally bouncing units, failing to submit orders for all units (except in the case of Italy's Venice unit and France's Marseilles unit), the chance of coming away with a win was nearly nothing and odds of surviving dropped dramatically.