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04/10/05 BWChart 1.03E : build order statistics

Before you can start analysing this list, you should understand where those build orders come from. The first step is to select a set of replays. The usual replay filter (player name, starting positions, match up, etc) is used to filter the replay database. You can see the current replay selection by clicking the "replays" button on the left, as usual. The "Content: xxxx replays" tells you how many replays are in the current selection.

Now that you have selected a bunch of replays (or all replays if you didnt use any filtering), you must setup the build order filtering. Having a list of all build orders without any filtering isn't very interesting. What you will probably want to do, is filter on the match up, for example. To do so, use the X vs Y part of the filter.

Now, A build order contains many things: buildings, units, research, upgrades. Sometimes, it is more interesting to look at the build orders without one of those things, for example, without the units. You can use the corresponding check boxes to decide what to use and what to ignore. The build order list will refresh automatically.

The last thing you can play with is the number of items you want to include in the build orders. Remember that the more items you put and the more unique build orders there will be, therefore making the analysis less interesting. Again, changing this number will refresh the build order list automatically.

Obviously, you will need a big amount of replays to extract significative information from those statistics. You will also need to tune the various filtering options depending on the matchup and the kind of information you're looking for. Also, there are many build orders that are "almost identical" and still bwchart will consider them as totally separate, because in terms of pure item order, there are different. Unfortunately, the "almost identifical" factor is hard to put in a formal way and then into coding. I'll try to work on this later...

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