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Cost-efficiency of units - Page 2

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Sholip
Profile Blog Joined March 2014
Hungary422 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-07-10 17:06:30
July 10 2014 17:05 GMT
#21
Well, of course I didn't really expect to "discover" something that has not been known before . It's mainly just proving things we already know/suspect using numbers.

On July 11 2014 01:18 Axxis wrote:
Even removing the whole terrain/engagements and even micro from the equation, it will still vary depending on army size. We all know in smaller numbers marines aren't near as powerful as larger numbers.

Of course it depends on the army sizes. But if we just consider the cases when the engagement is a "draw", as Gere suggested,

On July 09 2014 07:27 Gere wrote:
And only if both teams end up 0-0 you can compare costs.

we could give a cost ratio regardless of army sizes if the assumptions for the Lanchester Model were true. Which they unfortunately aren't, except for maybe air vs. air battles.
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Also, Zest is best." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sholip
Profile Blog Joined March 2014
Hungary422 Posts
July 10 2014 18:59 GMT
#22
Following Gere's suggestions, I added the "Lanchester efficiency" to my program. The smaller this number, the more efficient the unit. Any unit against the same unit type has this value as 1.
This kind of efficiency yields almost always the same best/worst counters for a unit as my theory, so that's something at least I think .
If everything is going according to plan, you can download the latest version of the app here and find what you are curious about!
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Also, Zest is best." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gere
Profile Joined December 2010
Germany55 Posts
July 11 2014 21:42 GMT
#23
On July 10 2014 23:58 Sholip wrote:
C1 / C2 = c1 / c2 * sqrt(RS2 / RS1).

Is this square root that square root? Do you suggest the use of this ratio C1 / C2 as the cost-efficiency quantity? This would actually be a nice value to work with, because it has no dimension and you only have to chech if it is greater than 1 or not to decide if a unit is cost-efficient.
The only thing that bugs me is that I know for certain that Lanchester's Square Law, upon which this whole calculation rests, fails to describe ranged battles in SC, let alone melee units. I will do a writeup on this topic soon.

Yes, that's exactly the square root. Lanchester's square law should only break down if the assumptions don't hold well. This would be, if not all units attack at once or one unit types lifes much longer (i.e. fight is more discrete).
Everything is an approximation, but i remember having good predictions for Zergling vs Zealot in SC1.

Anyway, I believe in empirical tests. Neither method is perfect, but I'd be really interested to know which method matches the Unit Tester better For this, it would be helpful if you check where predictions between both models differ.
Gere
Profile Joined December 2010
Germany55 Posts
July 14 2014 05:37 GMT
#24
On July 11 2014 03:59 Sholip wrote:
If everything is going according to plan, you can download the latest version of the app here and find what you are curious about!

Nice tool! It would be great if the tool would also check for a text file in the same directory to read in the unit data. This way I could try to put Starbow data and play with that
Sholip
Profile Blog Joined March 2014
Hungary422 Posts
July 14 2014 16:41 GMT
#25
On July 14 2014 14:37 Gere wrote:
Nice tool! It would be great if the tool would also check for a text file in the same directory to read in the unit data. This way I could try to put Starbow data and play with that

Well, I should be able to do that.
"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Also, Zest is best." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
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