Demographics of an Aurora Race

[Theodidactus (OP)]

I debated whether or not to put this in the "advanced tactical command academy" but decided against it.
So Hi, I haven't been on the forum in a long time...still been playing aurora.
in the real world I'm an academic librarian and I do a lot of work with social science data like the US Census and worldbank.
A few days ago I couldn't get to sleep and I got the strange idea to apply the tools I use on large datasets to the demography of my aurora game.
This is definitely a contender for "strangest thing I've ever done" but it produced some interesting results.

It makes for an interesting dataset for all the following reasons:
1) It's weighted by the designer, that is, steve, in consistent ways (example: characters with a high political reliability bonus get promoted more often)
2) it's weighted by the player, that is me, in unique ways (example: characters with brazilian surnames get promoted more often in this universe)
3) it's weighted by both circumstance and internal bias in ways I might not expect
4) unlike census data, it can be cross tabulated and examined in extreme detail. Fictional characters have no anonymized data.
5) most importantly, unlike real life data, aurora can objectively measure things like "skill at flying a starfighter" or "skill at studying alien ruins". For a sociologist, this is fascinating in a very deep way

This report will probably be more interesting if you have some idea how the game works already: IE how the game decides the names for characters and assigns them to commands, ect.


So: currently the game simulates 859 living human characters. Using a single table from the aurora database I can track about 50 datapoints on each character.

Question 1, easy question: are there more male commanders or female commanders? what about commanders of different types. The top attached image is a breakdown of gender for all commanders. (859 records)

The bottom attached image is a breakdown of just scientists. (~120 records)

Interesting right?
I don't know enough about how the game generates new characters to know how this weighting came about...or even if it actually is weighting as opposed to random chance, but it's a good early example. I have more interesting ones in another post.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The images arnt working 

[Theodidactus (OP)]

it's working now or should be.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

The main thing I was interested in seeing is how a character's situation can be different depending on things the game, and the player, have been weighting for a very long time. This game is 170+ years in the running, with a society that has a rich made-up social history. The two factors I'm most interested in are Homeworld and Character name.

Here's a population breakdown of the commanders in question by homeworld.

It looks like the game only draws characters from the 10 most heavily-populated worlds. The proportions featured on the graph roughly track their proportional population, but there are several other sparsely populated worlds that at least SOME officers should be coming from.

The "hot" colors on the graph are "nationalist" colonies that were colonized in the very early game, where i was simulating individual nations and their struggle for dominance in space. The "cold" colors on the graph are colonies that are free of all terrestrial nations, being fully independent states. Worlds in the same system have exactly the same color.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

To give you an idea of how interesting this could get, here's the same breakdown of homeworld but this time for only those 100 characters with the highest "promotion scores"
there are several factors influencing the difference in breakdown from one to the other, including the presence or absence of military academies on particular worlds, and the player actively discriminating against certain worlds at certain points in the game's history, and awarding preferential commands to certain characters based on homeworld.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

Example of intersection with real life social science: here is a chart of the distribution of promotion scores. This is roughly a "pareto distribution" which is found throughout real-life social science datasets (imagine graphing people by income or total wealth for example). I expect MOST aurora races will have a distribution like this perhaps with a slightly less dramatic uptick at the end. My highest-ranking character has a special medal that gives him a super high promotion score (basically "this guy is the president of everything" award).

[Theodidactus (OP)]

and here's a scatter plot showing promotion score by age. You can see (probably) that there's a pretty strong correlation between promotion score and age. As time goes on, an officer will accumulate more chances to distinguish him/herself, and get better at certain skills.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

The next three charts will examine nationality. this was the variable I really really wanted to look at, but involved a fair bit of "manipulation" on my part. To what extent does nationality influence a character's career in my aurora game?

The game includes no "nationality" field for commanders, however, it selects names from preappointed name lists. I've changed these name lists periodically throughout the game to demonstrate the rise and fall of various factions and power groups. Those of you who read my fiction on the forum (like, all 1 of you or whatever) know that Russia, for example, used to be a mighty power bloc in my game but has sense fallen out of favor: I represented this by instructing the game to generate less "russian sounding" officers and by actively discriminating against them in promotion in favor of power blocs that are more politically favorable (Brazil, ect).

I had to hand-enter the nationality of the 859 officers in my dataset, using their name and homeworld as a rough guide (So for example I applied rules like "All Portuguese names on earth are from brazil, spanish names from earth are from NATO or the EU, alternating. All french names on mars are from the EU or the afrcian union, alternating")  . This took less time than you might think because I can take a few shortcuts (it's easy to teach a computer to "spot easy Portuguese names" by instructing it to hunt for certain letters that only appear in Portuguese names. Because euphrates is an independent colony all characters from that colony have the nationality "euphrates" all characters regardless of name are from "Tibet" if they're from the world of Tiamat).

here is a general population breakdown of officers by relevant nationality. The relevant national power blocs are NATO, RUSSO, the EU, Japan, the China Sphere, the Eternal Kingdom of Tibet, the African Union, Euphrates, Freeside, Monticello, Tolkien, and Brazil. One cell is constantly coding as nATO rather than NATO, and I don't want to fix that right now, so that's the artifact you see at the bottom of the chart.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

but here's a breakdown of the nationality of the 50 highest promotion scores. There's clear biasing toward the nation of Brazil and away from its political enemies (esp Tibet). What's interesting though is that the China Sphere does not seem to be affect as much as I thought it was...I expected a much lower percentage. The only color difference in this chart is the african union (which should be bright green not hunter green) whoops.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

lastly, here's that scatter plot showing promotion score and age again, but this time I've colored individual points by national alignment. Nations of the current regime are in blue, nations of the old regime are in red, and nations of what appears to be the up and coming regime are in yellow

[Theodidactus (OP)]

That's all I'm doing for now...but what are you curious about? Want to see how one skill correlates with another? Want to see what makes a character more or less likely to win a medal? Analyze your own games if you know how, or post hypothesis I can test below.