Attacker Protection Build Banks/Armories

[Eigenvector]

I didn't even read the whole thing seems to much of a load of crap. One can measure the benefits of banks by taking the difference of natural income from total income. Taking the difference will give you a more meaningful answer then "/". One can measure the benefit of armories by taking the different detween the normal cost of the unit and the new cost of the unit. For example, defspec. costs 300gc the new defpec cost is only 266gc. Take 266 from 300 and you get 34gc saved on defspec training.

This is just another case of someone trying to sound smart rather than be smart.

Vines, we are measuring the same thing on different variables. You are measuring net cash while I am measuring ratios. Your measurement of banks is on the additional income you receive and your measurements of armories is on the amount of money it saves you per troop, which measures the two effects on their own terms without trying to reconcile the two. I did almost the same thing except divided both by the intrinsic values, the original values, in order to have a way of comparing their effects. If apples and oranges do different things, you need to put them both on the same scale in order to compare them. Separate analyses are meaningful and will give you a good picture, but lacks a maximization function, which you can also argue is unnecessary. You have pointed out an alternate way of analyzing the situation and I'll give you some credit. However, you haven't actually found a hole in my calculation or produced a counterexample to disprove it, so "the whole thing seems to much of a load of crap" isn't supported very well.

The argument my model is not useful holds a little more water. The model, as all models do, has assumptions, and as others have pointed out, these assumptions don't hold true for all players. If you'd like to remove the assumptions and generalize it completely, you'd just have to keep adding more parameters and make the function ever so much more complicated.

didy mentions "The most efficient way isnt necessary to have most troops oop." Each player has different priorities and your priority may not be to train the most troops; if that's your case, my model doesn't work in your case, so you can trash it. What's efficient depends on your strategy. I'm only taking a particular case, which I assume can be useful for many players.

Bored's argument is that this whole thing is unnecessary, probably because it doesn't provide you much benefit to do the calculation. Very well. Most people manage without any calculations at all and it's definitely possible to have a good build strategy without doing any math. I'm looking for an exact optimal number, which you cannot get without calculations. It's possibly a lot of work for very little use, but it's worth it for me. And I don't even have the optimal build because I didn't take all the factors into consideration, only the most relevant. So it's possible my calculation is even worse than intuition or practice, in which case Asakura would be correct. But I think that my model is reasonably well representative and is likely to provide a good estimation.

Why optimize during protection? Because protection is the only time when models are deterministic, with no randomness; once ur OOP, there are random factors, that you cannot determine for sure, and the model becomes stochastic and very chaotic. OOP, your number of troops is affected by getting attacked, and there's a random chance you get attacked, which is a function of how strong your province is, and we can go on with this...However, during protection you get the benefit of knowing that everything is totally predictable, and so it's the only time where an optimization calculation is even feasible. You can do calculations for OOP, but you can't be 100% confident of the results, you can only specify and confidence interval and even then for less than 100% confidence. And then you have to use statistics to do it. It's at that point when I say it's not worth doing the calculation.

Saveid, you are correct in that armories reduce draft costs which provides an extra benefit I didn't already mention. If you include that, you'll get a better model than mine, in which case you'll probably end up with even more armories. My model is of course, incomplete, but I think it's a reasonable approximation, taking only the factors that affect your outcome the most. Also, I'm playing orc this age, which is affected by draft costs considerably less than the others, and I was thinking a little more for myself than for the general case. ;) About your OOP build, I'm making the assumption of a complete conversion OOP, in which case the OOP build is independent of the protection build. In protection, I'd go 30% banks and 30% arms; I'm thinking about 10 hours to OOP, I'm razing the majority of them and building TGs, forts and whatever else I need. And now you can say I didn't factor the raze and rebuild costs into the equation; correct.