riddler-castles/castle-solutions: 1199
Data license: CC Attribution 4.0 License · Data source: fivethirtyeight/data on GitHub · About: simonw/fivethirtyeight-datasette
rowid | Castle 1 | Castle 2 | Castle 3 | Castle 4 | Castle 5 | Castle 6 | Castle 7 | Castle 8 | Castle 9 | Castle 10 | Why did you choose your troop deployment? |
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1199 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 26 | 30 | 33 | 0 | As per my e-mail to Oliver, I have previously submitted an entry but I would like to change it to the above. My thinking has not changed all that much. I still think that a proportionate strategy is best but that it is also a good idea to aim for enough points to win, rather than all of the points. I also think that a strategy needs to be robust against similar strategies and to defeat all obvious strategies. My concern, however, is that an opponent who anticipates the popularity of a proportionate strategy could exploit this by making their strategy slightly less proportionate, for example by overloading castle 10 at the expense of one of the other castles. This would defeat a proportionate strategy which targeted the same castles. The best way to counter this is to not target castle 10 at all, and to let those smart alecs waste their resources. Therefore, my strategy is now an almost-proportionate 28 point strategy, focusing on castles 4, 7, 8, 9. It is only non-proportionate to the extent that it takes 3 troops away from castle 4, and adds one to each of castles 7, 8 and 9. I have done no computer simulations - this is all in my head - but as far as I can see, it will do very well against almost every opponent. It will defeat every fully proportionate strategy and every non-proportionate strategy in which the emphasis is on overloading castle 10. It will also defeat a flat strategy, in which 10 troops are allocated to each castle, or 25 troops are allocated to each of four different castles. |