[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Torvak:
I'd also point out that the value of holy troops depends very much on the pretender. With a rainbow pretender i don't care much about them.

Yep. That's why the values of the units are variable - once the algorithm is designed, the AI can assign each unit a value, and the algorithm will optimize for those values. So if the AI has Water-9 Fire-9, it can give the "holy" resource a high value (or give holy units a high value), while a pretender with no bless effects could give "holy" a value of zero. The same algorithm would work each time!

Originally posted by LaFollet:
I have to ask, how did you come up with the "value" for the units? Are you just pulling numbers out of nowhere, or are these bassed of of acctual units in game?

There are 5 possibilities here. It is not a "solved" problem yet, but rather "the other half" of this problem.

1) People could look at each of the 1080 units (or just each of the units in a national lineup) and assign them fixed values. Then, when the game runs, a "Heavy Cavalry" always has a value of, say, 51. This would take a bit of human work and be subjective.
2) The game could dynamically adjust values of units by tracking them. In other words, every unit could start a game with a value based on their resource cost, or based on (1) above. But each turn, that cost would be adjusted by the success rate: If all the Heavy Cavalry units had (overall) 35 deaths and 76 kills, then heavy cavalry would be valued at 76/35, or 2.17. Whereas if Militias had overall 346 deaths and 13 kills, they would be given a value of 13/346=.037. That way, units that are useful in the current strategic climate would be favored.
3) Numbers could come from the Combat Simulator. Unfortunately, that only works for melee units, and ignores some factors like trample and routing.
4) Somebody could develop an algorithm that assigns a value to a unit based on its stats and special abilities. This would be objective, but imperfect. Probably the best bet, though.
5) I'm sure there are others=)

Originally posted by LaFollet:
And wouldn't it be more beneficial if the code made sure that a percentage was archers, or mounted, or footsoldiers?

I know there was mention of a combined arms approach and how that would increase the value of units over others, to attempt to convince the code to use different types, but why not just make it take a certain percentage of each type?

No. This problem is intended to be perfectly generic, objective, and pure. That way, it can apply to any game regardless of the game's specifics, and solves a clearly-defined problem.

What you suggest can be done within the existing problem statement: Create 3 new resources, "bows", "saddles", and "boots", and give archers, cavalry, and soldiers a cost of 1 in that respective Category. Then give those resources a very high value, and give the province a certain number of each (maybe 2 bows, 4 boots, and 1 saddle) so that the algorithm will attempt to produce a minimum of 2 archers, 4 soldiers, and 1 cavalry each turn. It is best to keep the overall problem and algorithm as simple as possible and achieve complex results by adding parameters to the specific case.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Well, if you were to offer a combined arms bonus, you should also offer a massing bonus. A single archer is rather useless. Of course, to evaluate this, would then require a longer-term view than single-turn production: Now you're looking at a puzzle of multi-turn strategic production.

Any army produced in a single turn is virtually useless. There are ways to make the solver more powerful, but only at the expense of complexity in both the algorithm and description... Perhaps, if this contest has a good response, a 2nd generation contest could be proposed, with additional factors considered.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Naturally, if somebody were to actually create a good solution to this problem, he'd have permanently solved the solution of bad unit composition in AIs for every single strategy game in existence!

Well, that's the goal=) Wouldn't it be neat to make a program / algorithm useful to all queued-production strategy games in existance?