[atul]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
What do you think, should combined arms be added to the problem statement?

What about... another program altogether?-> I've got the picture that while the objective of this program would be to maximize the value of one turn's production, the whole problem of combined arms spans over several turns' recruitment.

So, what I had in mind before reading this day's discussion, was a program that would count different values every turn anew. And, well...

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
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:

While I like this one, I think there's a slight problem with looking at success rate. Example: You've just recruited a huge number of longbows, but first thing happen to send them against fliers on 'attack archers'. Result, your longbows are massacred with minimal kills, and the algorithm never lets you recruit them again to redeem themselves. Ok, that was simplistic, but I hope made my point.

In addition, there are troops that are supposed to be sent to be massacred, like those ultra-cheap R'lyeh's lobotomized atlantians or C'tis's lesser lizards. (this is represented by cheapness which is taken into account by program, but hard to say without testing how well it does)

What I'd think would be nice would be some sort of combination of your different proposition, mainly 1) and 2), with different weights (of course ) to each part. This would take account what happens during the game, but would also benefit from subjective experience of people (if everyone thinks Man should be about longbows and wardens, then so be it, and so on) and thematic correctness.

And the point why I was writing this, lest I forget (almost did). One more thing for the value-evaluation: number of different troops already existent. The target composition could be from a priori decided values, and a big boost would be given to troop type that is underrepresented.

Like in previous example, longbows would have large value boost for being a minority (and a slight penalty for doing so badly). This would keep the overal troop composition more consistent (no so big fluctuations as single troop types get both killed and have their prod values reduced at the same time) but allow a long-term change.

Ok, that went nearly off the subject. But no-one forces anyone to read these, so...