NS Stats - Trends, Correlations, Anti-Correlations, Oh My!

[Valentine Z]

Hmm, interesting one as well – as I always say. Though to be honest? There is not much of a linking or anything to do here. Not that this does not mean I have a terrible or a boring time doing this. I still like it, just that not all the time, it won’t be as… obvious. Still, let’s take a look at it as always! A bit of a slight increase on either end – a really bad weather or a really good weather is more grounds for a bigger defense force.

NS unfortunately limits the graph sizes to 1800 px. BUT – I have also put a link on the images so if you click on the graphs, it will take you to the original-sized images!

With density as the Z-axis. As you know, Blue = Least Dense = Very rare. Red = Most Dense = Where most nations are.

Population as the Z-axis. Once again, all of them are on a linear scale.

Number of Issues Answered as the Z-axis. Once again, all of them are on a linear scale.

X-axis histograms.

Y-axis histograms:

X max and Y max: 0
X min and Y min: 0
X max and Y min: 0
X min and Y max: 0

X max: 1 – Copercia with 9713 Weather!
X min: 1 – Cutote with -14664 Weather!
Y max: 1 – Honorias with 237,849.76 Defense Forces!
Y min: 1 – Blogotopia with -112.96 Defense Forces!

Now onto the relations!

High Weather (> 151.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77): 9713 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38): 2266 nations out of 309321.
High Weather (> 151.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38): 4876 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77): 11014 nations out of 309321.

All of them are possible! So the first one – High Weather, High Defense Forces. Sunny and good weather, a better motivation to fight and to arm themselves with. There is a little bit more nuance and subtext to this sort of thing, actually. What if the high weather resulted in temperatures that are unbearable and too hot? Hot enough that there are water shortages and the like? Which would lead to battles and fight for precious resources like water. As per the metric, it’s not always good that you get an intense boatload of sunshine. The opposite can also happen – the incredibly low weather, little to no sunlight, which then means that you are fighting (again) for food and whatever energy that you can get and generate to produce more food.

With those two out of the way, you have – High Weather and Low Defense Forces. A sunshine and cheery place, there’s not really a need for an army. Well, not just that. Perhaps these are the places that enjoyed a good amount of peace and quiet, so there’s not really a lot of need to be armed to the teeth. Or it could also be wartorn places that have a dwindling armed forces to protect themselves with.

Low Weather and Low Defense Forces are the rarest, but still possible. Like the counterpart of the above, it’s a cool place with not a need for an army (or again, they are slowly getting decimated). By these two stats alone, it is a bit difficult to infer anything. But hey, this is what we are here for, to make sense of it and make some stories and interpretations out of it all.

And now to compare these with population.

High Weather (> 151.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), High Population (> 14,489,000,000): 1531 nations out of 309321.
High Weather (> 151.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), Low Population (< 201,000,000): 0 nations out of 309321.
Tiny islands that enjoy high weather and with barbed wires all over the place? Maybe not possible.

Low Weather (< 78.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), High Population (> 14,489,000,000): 703 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), Low Population (< 201,000,000): 68 nations out of 309321.

High Weather (> 151.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), High Population (> 14,489,000,000): 1665 nations out of 309321.
High Weather (> 151.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), Low Population (< 201,000,000): 11 nations out of 309321.

Low Weather (< 78.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), High Population (> 14,489,000,000): 2686 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), Low Population (< 201,000,000): 2 nations out of 309321.
Tiny ice islands that enjoy cool weather and with barbed wires all over the place? It can work, but they are very rare. Maybe arctic army bases.

And one more time with Number of Issues Answered.

High Weather (> 151.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), High Number of Issues Answered (> 1,000): 6801 nations out of 309321.
High Weather (> 151.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), Low Number of Issues Answered (< 100): 187 nations out of 309321.
You need more issue answering, but it is possible to get them early on.

Low Weather (< 78.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), High Number of Issues Answered (> 1,000): 493 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), Low Number of Issues Answered (< 100): 530 nations out of 309321.
There’s an equal weight, so this is just a matter of preference. Some people keep it this way, others don’t.

High Weather (> 151.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), High Number of Issues Answered (> 1,000): 1972 nations out of 309321.
High Weather (> 151.00), Low Defense Forces (< 695.38), Low Number of Issues Answered (< 100): 172 nations out of 309321.

Low Weather (< 78.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), High Number of Issues Answered (> 1,000): 5788 nations out of 309321.
Low Weather (< 78.00), High Defense Forces (> 7,418.77), Low Number of Issues Answered (< 100): 336 nations out of 309321.

[Pencil Sharpeners 2]

I believe weather is entirely a 'secondary' stat - in that there are no issues that code weather to move up or down, it does so only in response to how other stats move, those being culture, environmental beauty, and health. Since defense forces doesn't impact any of these stats, it makes sense that you can have any combination of military and weather. I do like the log-log graph, it looks like a butterfly.

[Valentine Z]

I believe weather is entirely a 'secondary' stat - in that there are no issues that code weather to move up or down, it does so only in response to how other stats move, those being culture, environmental beauty, and health. Since defense forces doesn't impact any of these stats, it makes sense that you can have any combination of military and weather. I do like the log-log graph, it looks like a butterfly.

That and I have just yapped about this in the NS Issues Discord, so I will share it here too!

Weather's stat unit is also... very confusing and does not make a lot of sense. "Meters Of Sunlight" is a really baffling unit. Why not "Percentage of sunlight per square km" or something to that effect? But then yeah it shouldn't really be a percentage because we will yet again get another stat that is hard-capped between 0% and 100%.

"Area of Sunlight per square km", or even "Hours of sunlight" - that can work. Heck, it can go above 24 hours of sunlight and it may not be inaccurate. You can interpret "48 hours of sunlight" as "OKAY we got way too much sun now!"

Also indeed, there are a lot of log-log graphs that look like butterflies. :3 The reasoning behind using Symmetry log is due to these stats having 0 or negative values. If not (hint: Health stat for the next one!), I will use the normal log plot. ♥

[Jutsa]

The confusing thing about weather is it feels like a strongly environmental stat, since many things like mining and the like seem to lower weather. I could see that pollution and wildfire smoke and heck even rotting trash would lower air quality and breathability.

Another issue is that more sunlight is not actually a good thing, in and of itself. You'd want to have a decent amount of rain, or whatever form of precipitation seems appropriate for your nation. I could certainly see that having fewer cyclones, tornadoes, flooding, etc. would be a good thing, though so would droughts, so maybe good weather just implies your nation is more like Arizona or central Australia, and worse implies its more like Mississippi... or maybe Britain.

The weirdest part is that culture increasing also causes weather to decrease, which suggests a nation that is more traditional and aesthetically distinct or pleasing or has more unique art (whatever it is exactly that culture itself actually means) causes the weather to get worse (again, whatever that means).

This almost makes me wonder if weather is more of a mood indicator than reflecting actual weather, which would also explain "meters of sunlight". Maybe it's not tracking air quality at all; just how citizens or visitors perceive the quality of the atmosphere around them. (i.e. similar to how environmental beauty works.) Still a very, very weird stat though.

[Pencil Sharpeners 2]

Weather's stat unit is also... very confusing and does not make a lot of sense. "Meters Of Sunlight" is a really baffling unit. Why not "Percentage of sunlight per square km" or something to that effect? But then yeah it shouldn't really be a percentage because we will yet again get another stat that is hard-capped between 0% and 100%.

"Area of Sunlight per square km", or even "Hours of sunlight" - that can work. Heck, it can go above 24 hours of sunlight and it may not be inaccurate. You can interpret "48 hours of sunlight" as "OKAY we got way too much sun now!"

Funny enough, I am planning a little post about weather units to be released (probably) early next week, in honour of my puppet Copercia reaching 10,000 meters of sunlight.

The weirdest part is that culture increasing also causes weather to decrease, which suggests a nation that is more traditional and aesthetically distinct or pleasing or has more unique art (whatever it is exactly that culture itself actually means) causes the weather to get worse (again, whatever that means).

This almost makes me wonder if weather is more of a mood indicator than reflecting actual weather, which would also explain "meters of sunlight". Maybe it's not tracking air quality at all; just how citizens or visitors perceive the quality of the atmosphere around them. (i.e. similar to how environmental beauty works.) Still a very, very weird stat though.

The idea is that cultural things are usually indoors (museums, art galleries etc.). NS models this as nations with worse weather are likely to be more cultured because people are going to be spending time indoors, rather than at the park or on the beach. Of course, the link between the stats is the other way around - a change in culture causes a change in weather. I guess this is because it's hard for the government to control the weather, so NS assumes that governments that support culture probably do so because their nation has bad weather.

[Trotterdam]

Does it count when our pegasi use weather control as a weapon of war?

[Valentine Z]

I am exploring some other image uploader, because long story short according to Violet: Flickr is currently blocking requests from this forum, unfortunately.

I could move to ImgBB or somewhere else, but I really do need Flickr's option whereby I can have multiple sizes on the same image, instead of having to upload two versions for each image. And I am not going to reduce the size of the graphs natively to 1800 px, that's way too small.

Sorry for the further delay! >,<

This does not affect the current images, but I cannot upload new Flickr links.

[Valentine Z]

I know, I know, I keep getting distracted! Regular scheduling will come back, I do promise! With that said, let's look at something quite interesting...

WA Category count over the years! Yes, from 2013 to 2026, would you like to see how the trends have changed? Some are new, some are old. Some timeless. Some are VERY rare.

Method - Using the Daily Data Dump, I decided to look at the WA Category count using Python. Simple and neat XML reading and parsing, though with special characters that I have to fix and avoid. As for the dates, I didn't look at every single day, that would have been REALLY intensive and heavy, perhaps a bit redundant. Instead, I look at the first day of each month; if I cannot find that, then it will be the next closest day.

Thankfully, WA Category stay at index 4 (starting from 0) throughout the entire lifetime of data dumps. I can just use [4] and be done with that. Though there's a catch with weirdness between XML and motto characters. So there was another method I have to use. Either way, it didn't take too long, thankfully.

Without further ado - here they are!

You can click on the images for a bigger version!

[Ceved Azan]

i'm not messing with this bbcode twih

I wonder what caused the spike in 2016.

[Valentine Z]

i'm not messing with this bbcode twih

I wonder what caused the spike in 2016.

Not very sure as well. Since this is way before the Drewapocalypse and all that, likely that someone (or some group, maybeee?) just got a lot of those nations up. I know a couple of folks who have tens or hundreds of nations with the intent of just min-maxxing some stat, or going for some category goal.

Could also be some change in how the stats derive or are calculated to account for the Category?