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?
1,2,2,2,2,6,18,2,28,36,2,DONT KNOW
2,1,1,1,11,19,27,37,1,1,1,"I'm going for the crumbs, hoping that most opponents bet on the valuable castles. And by betting at least 1 soldier on each I'm winning the ones that the opponent doesn't send any soldier to."
3,2,3,4,5,6,22,6,22,22,8,"Based on previous results, I focussed on castles 6, 8 and 9 and left myself a healthy backup in each of the others"
4,2,2,4,6,6,10,11,14,17,28,"Fairly evenly spread out, with an emphasis on the point-heavy castles."
5,1,1,2,3,16,22,1,1,33,20,Sheer whimsy.
6,2,2,11,12,12,16,16,17,6,6,"I focused on getting the extreme castles (1,2,3,4,9,10) while hoping to steal one of the middle castles (5,6,7,8)"
7,1,1,1,9,3,1,24,28,31,1,Need 28 to win. Don’t focus on 10 as others will. Hedge with a maybe getting 5
8,1,4,5,8,9,11,12,15,16,19,Simple weighting according to expected value
9,4,4,14,13,13,2,15,15,10,10,"I mostly trusted my gut, but did a back over the envelop best response iteration."
10,2,1,5,20,4,20,4,20,4,20,
11,1,4,12,14,7,16,18,20,3,5,"I focused on a combination that would get me to 28 points, but still tried to have above average on the castles that others might try to put 1-3 troops at."
12,1,2,1,3,5,20,21,33,7,7,
13,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,32,32,You only need 28 to win
14,1,1,6,10,14,15,23,24,3,3,"I'm reverting to something closer to the winning strategy of this question's first instance. I'm sending few troops to the highest and lowest valued castles, instead focusing my parties on the middle-values."
15,1,1,1,2,1,15,21,26,31,1,"Goal is to maximize odds of winning 28 or more, and winning 6 through 9 seemed to have the easiest path of getting there. Skipping 5 and leaving 2 at 4 is because 4+6+7+8+9 is enough to win, happy to leave 5 behind to win 6-9."
16,1,1,1,21,1,1,21,21,31,1,"In order to win a war I need to get 28 points, anything more doesn't matter and anything less may as well be zero.  So I chose to strongly contest 4 spots which would allow me to get that score if I only one those (9, 8, 7, and 4).  For each of the remaining spots I chose to place a single troop in case someone also heavily contests one of these numbers but leaves another spot entirely uncontested.  Finally I chose numbers ending in 1 because I assumed that many people would choose round numbers and therefore I would have some chance of barely beating them."
17,1,0,0,0,1,14,34,34,14,2,"It’s basically a bell curve, but with one soldier in Castle 1 because I had to. "
18,1,1,1,1,1,19,19,19,19,19,"I only need 4 of the 5 largest castles to win, so I just put all my troops equally in those 5 so there is no chance someone beats me in all 5!"
19,3,5,7,9,11,2,16,18,15,14,"I have optimised this strategy to beat the average deployment from the last iteration of the game, by sacrificing castle 6,which was not well contested last time, so I expect it to be hotly contested this time round."
20,1,1,1,1,23,23,24,24,1,1,Trying to capture the mid-high castles and sacrifice the others
21,3,3,3,3,3,10,15,20,30,10,"Just guessing based on the previous two events. 678 heavy vs 459,10 heavy, sort of a mix."
22,1,2,2,8,10,15,17,19,23,3,"I tried to look for a mix between the successful armies in 1 and 2. I targeted 4-9 because they total more than half the points, and dropping 1-2 of these castles wouldn't stop my victory. "
23,2,2,3,14,2,16,2,4,32,23,Intuition.
24,2,3,4,5,7,9,26,33,6,5,It just felt *right*
25,4,4,4,4,16,4,16,28,16,4,To mess with the averages
26,6,6,7,0,0,0,21,25,0,35,"Castles 1-3 and 6-8 were the most ignored by the top 5 warlords in the last round. 4-5 and 9-10 were most popular. I figured if I can almost guarantee getting 10 by placing 35 soldiers, ignore 9 where most others will send a significant amount, capture 7-8 which look to be ignored by most, and capture 1-3 which will be ignored for low point value, I could total 31 points which is more than enough to win a majority of the battles. Maybe a simpleminded strategy but this is based purely off the results of the last round and it could be an obvious one. "
27,2,6,9,9,12,2,28,27,2,3,Just did a pretty similar strategy to Cyrus.
28,1,1,1,1,1,5,5,10,25,50,"I figured if I can guarantee a split or victory of high level castles, that can override the lower level ones--this is not very scientific.  Also, the form doesn't allow us to send 0 soldiers to a given castle."
29,2,4,5,8,10,11,12,14,16,18,Impossible to say.
30,1,1,1,1,1,1,91,1,1,1,Banking on winning ALL the battles at Castle 7
31,1,1,1,2,14,15,2,28,32,4,"Winning 5, 6, 8, and 9 gives me just over half of the available points, so I went hard for those four."
32,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,Linear
33,4,4,4,5,5,16,5,5,21,31,
34,1,6,6,11,11,16,16,16,11,6,"Figure 5x would be a popular number to distribute, so 5x+1 along a skewed curve based on intuition."
35,2,4,6,12,12,2,21,3,30,8,
36,1,1,3,5,10,18,24,30,4,4,"A few at top to steal from old strategy, then strength in higher numbers, gave up bottom completely "
37,1,10,1,1,1,1,28,28,28,1,28 is the number needed to win so targeted to scrape a win. Did not contend the highest scoring castle as some will likely go very heavy there
38,3,4,4,4,6,8,11,11,23,26,"A gradual top down deployment, going for numbers that would beat rounded off choices like 25 or 10 on some of the larger castles."
39,6,8,10,12,14,0,0,0,24,26,I think people will adjust back to the top half numbers after the success of the winning answers from last round but will still be scared to drop too much into the highest value targets.
40,2,3,4,6,8,9,18,20,12,18,"I am uncertain as to how people will adjust to two contests worth of results, so I've taken a slightly more balanced approach that targets higher value castles more proportionately to their values, while still leaving enough troops to pick up the low and mid value castles that others may defend lightly."
41,1,5,10,0,0,0,0,28,28,28,Because I'm trying my best.
42,1,2,9,4,6,14,9,8,21,26,Send the troops where the most points are.
43,2,3,3,12,15,7,14,14,17,13,"I looked at the historical success strategies of the first and second FiveThirtyEight crusades. It looked like people in the second war adjusted their strategy away from what won in the first war. So I took the top 5 from each war and took the average number of troops per castle. I picked numbers close to the average to deploy my troops for the Third FiveThirtyEight crusade. And once I take over the world, I'll change the name of your website to FiveThirtyNine."
44,1,2,2,2,2,2,29,29,29,2,"Becuase I'm smart, in my head."
45,1,3,5,5,5,5,5,32,5,34,"The most prominent strategies that have been winning have been strategies that have had the ""four castle"" strategy which would win the slight majority of the points (28). Assuming this is the strategy most people seek to optimize on I wanted to build a strategy that would beat these strategies. Every four base must win either castle 10 or castle 8 to reach this 28 point threshold (which is the primary way they win). After that the number of troops sent to the other castles should be greater than with a four castle strategy that you win the rest of the needed points on the castles that others gave over for free. I would like to test it with 30 in bases 8,10 and 5 troops in 1 and 3 as well but I think you need to make sure you juice your troop count in the bases you are going for because if you don't win at least one of those you are going to be in trouble. You will also lose to a split evenly strategy but I don't think that will be popular as most people will look at the data and realize you probably want to have a win condition."
46,1,1,4,4,22,22,17,17,6,6,"I started with attempting to punish those who didn't send enough troops to the 'Extremes' (Castles 1-4 & Castle 9-10).  Sending less than 5 will result in a loss at 9 & 10, and sending 0 or 1 to the first 4 will result in a loss.  Next, I want to win at least 2 (hopefully 3) of Castles 5-8 so I went with 22 at 5 & 6 since previous winners from the first 2 iterations sent a max of 21.  Finally, I distributed my last troops evenly to Castle 7 & 8."
47,1,6,6,6,11,11,6,26,21,6,Tried to use just above multiples of 5 because that is a human habit when splitting things.
48,4,2,5,10,10,17,16,16,4,16,"I foresee a lot of fighting over Castle 9. Thus, I focused on 7,8, and 10 to hopefully get a fair number of victories there."
49,3,4,4,14,20,3,21,3,25,3,
50,4,4,4,4,4,24,24,24,4,4,"I figured at least 4 in each would pick off the people who sent out tiny forces, but still let me sink in a few in more strategic spots."
51,1,5,8,12,13,1,26,30,2,2,I copied the first winner one minor arbitrary change.
52,2,4,6,7,9,11,13,14,16,18,Weighted distribuation
53,3,6,9,14,18,22,28,0,0,0,"Ignore the top ones, focus on minimum needed for majority of points"
54,1,1,1,1,2,7,10,20,35,22,"I went top heavy and ignored the low point castles due to their inefficiency as the are 1.8 digits
Soldiers per point. "
55,1,2,0,0,0,0,0,32,32,33,"The top 3 castles score 27 points in total, almost 50% of the point total. Assuming I can win all 3 and pick up a single unguarded low point castle, i will prevail."
56,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,I took the ratio of the points for each castle against the total points possible (10/55) and multiplied it by 100 to determine the number of soldiers for each castle.
57,1,4,9,10,1,13,16,17,14,15,I assumed the number of soldiers necessary based a trend from the previous two events.  I then added one soldier to castles 6 through 10 and subtracted one soldier from castles 1-5.  I then decided to sacrifice castles 1 and 5 and minimize their defenses and put their soldiers on the other 8 castles.
58,4,0,1,1,1,0,0,31,31,31,My goal is to acquire 28 points. This is on permutations of castle attacks that makes it likely
59,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,32,32,"I do have to win all 4 of my engagements, which doesn't leave any margin for error. I'm confident in castle 1, and 2/3 for 8-10. So I just have to get a little lucky that opponents spread their forces out too much."
60,2,2,9,11,16,10,30,5,8,7,Based on last year's deployments I observed that very few soldiers were deployed to the 9 and 10 castles so I send a force to that could take both of those. I sent a token force to the 1 and 2 castle as they are not worth that much. For the remainder I tried to get above last year's average except for castle 8 which I can afford to lose if I take either 9 or 10. However I may just be fighting the last war and be destroyed.
61,3,3,1,1,1,1,10,35,44,1,focus on castle 8 and 9 with the assumption that castle 10 is likely going to be taken and castle 1 and 2 will have 1 soldier brought to them
62,3,8,10,11,16,22,2,23,2,3,"Designed to lose 10, 9, 7 which would counteract the strategy of only winning the bottom 7 (since I'll steal 8, in exchange for their 7), and the strategy of winning the top numbers (I'm sacrificing 9, 10, while investing a lot in 8, 6, and lower, which adds up to more points than 7, 9, 10). "
63,1,1,1,2,7,18,20,22,23,5,Seemed pretty good I guess
64,1,0,0,20,20,0,0,0,35,24,Magic
65,4,8,8,8,12,32,17,4,3,4,Get 7 through 5 and then either 10 or 4 through 1.
66,1,0,0,18,18,3,3,3,32,22,Beats most of previous 2 games
67,2,2,4,0,22,10,12,13,0,35,Because this is what my future self told me to pick.
68,1,1,1,1,1,4,30,30,30,1,"Folks are likely to put a concerted effort to a few castles to secure their victories there. I'm hoping to win the less contested, but higher value castles."
69,3,3,3,3,13,18,21,32,2,2,"I put at least two people in each castle so I could beat the 0s and 1s in each castle. And then I tried to mimic the winners from the first time, thinking that the winning strategy would revert back to the first game."
70,1,2,5,11,15,3,3,27,31,2,First round won by 7/8 strategy. Second round won by 9/10 strategy. Went with 8/9 strategy.
71,3,4,5,5,8,21,6,23,4,21,get em
72,1,1,2,3,4,21,27,28,6,7,
73,1,5,9,13,17,19,15,11,7,3,Seemed like a good idea at the time.
74,1,1,6,7,9,11,13,15,16,21,100 points/55 weighted castles' value = 1.8181; multiplied that times each castles' value to determine proportioned weight; made a few gut adjustments
75,3,4,6,9,9,10,19,15,11,14,looked at prior results and then sort of winged it
76,1,2,3,16,20,3,3,3,31,18,Random!
77,1,1,1,15,1,20,1,28,2,30,Win 10 and 8 while giving up 9 to those who heavily go for it but winning it from those who send very few troops with the objective of winning 4 castles to get to 28 points.
78,2,2,2,18,18,18,18,18,2,2,"I felt that it would be useless to deploy them evenly. Putting at least 2 in every spot meant that if some else puts 1 or 0, i'll win. I figured others are most likely to go after 9 and 10, so i didn't really bother with them.  The remainder were split evenly."
79,3,3,4,6,7,9,15,25,27,1,I've never actually participated in something like this before. I assumed most people would attempt to capture the castle worth  the most points (10). I felt if I essentially sacrificed that castle and then stuck to a rather linear distribution of soldiers increasing from 1-9 I stood a greater chance of capturing those castles and thus winning the Game. I guess we'll see.
80,1,2,3,6,9,14,16,17,16,16,It slightly beat something that slightly beat May's average.
81,4,4,4,5,11,17,23,26,3,3,
82,1,1,4,8,10,13,16,19,16,12,seems plausible
83,3,6,6,11,11,1,27,30,2,3,"cluster forces around valuable castles most likely to be fought over (7 and 8), choose one middle but less valuable castle (6) to offer almost no defense of,  give  11% of forces to next level valuable castles (4 and 5) assuming most will give 10% to those castles. Also assumes most will attempt to cluster forces proportionately to win larger castles in some ratio of all forces in the 10, 9, 8, 7 castles, keeping more than 25% in castles 8 and 7. "
84,1,1,7,1,18,20,2,23,25,2,"Go big on some, steal the rest with some 1>0s and hope for some luck!"
85,2,4,5,7,9,11,12,15,16,19,"Direct mapping. Soldiers per castle = (points per castle / total points) * total soldiers, with rounding, and leftover soldier goes to castle 10. Trying to win by playing simpler than people expect. :)"
86,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,"Trying to be competitive at every single castle, without wasting too many soldiers."
87,2,7,2,2,13,18,23,29,2,2,"I wanted to get 28/55 points by committing to castles 8,7,6,5 and 2. I deployed these troops to help obtain 8 most frequently and 2 the least. I deployed 2 troops on each other castle to not allow for my enemies to get an easy 1-0 victory on any castle. If I can win one or two of those, that would be great "
88,15,15,7,2,26,2,2,3,10,18,Last time winners focused on the middle.  I'm focusing on the edges
89,1,1,1,1,1,5,10,15,25,40,
90,1,6,14,19,1,15,21,21,1,1,"I focused on the 3,4,6,7,8 field, that have good reward, but aren't tied. Put down at least one in the others to surprise my enemies who left castles unattended. By giving my enemy 10,9,5,2,1, I win out by 1. I am weak to attacks on the higher values, as a 7,8,9 30 split with a dump on 10 will destroy my attempt. As long as the enemy doesn't consolidate, then I shall claim victory."
91,1,2,3,5,7,15,30,33,2,2,Get to as close to 28 without wasting troops
92,2,2,3,3,20,20,20,20,5,5,"the plan is to win castles 5,6,7,8 and then hopefully pick up one more somewhere else."
93,1,5,0,7,8,21,0,28,30,0,optimize higher castles but never go in increments of five (leads to more ties which are inefficient). use 0 on castles that have a higher chance of being contested
94,1,0,0,2,1,0,17,21,27,31,"Securing the high castles is paramount to our victory, with a few sneaky +1 to counteract those who wish to tie us in mortal combat."
95,1,1,2,15,11,3,8,23,34,2,"Random, except for deciding to let the low castles go without much of a fight."
96,2,2,8,11,11,13,14,16,21,2,"Ignore castle 10 as large amount of pepople will try to send huge numbers of troops to take it, send at least 2 troops to every castle."
97,1,1,1,1,17,20,1,26,31,1,Mostly intuition. I don't have the computational power or coding skills (or advanced math skills) to really compete. Thought I'd at least send in an array of troop deployments for the experts to crush.
98,1,4,6,14,18,24,33,0,0,0,"Assuming more valuable castles will be more contested, negating their points advantage. 28 points wins, so it only makes sense to contest castles worth that many total. I took 1-7 (28 total pts), with troop allocations focused on the hotly contested 5,6,7 castles. I'm hoping to 'pay' for those by taking 1,2,3 cheaply."
99,4,4,4,10,13,14,17,16,8,10,Deception combined with winning the battle in the trenches
100,2,2,5,5,14,2,16,19,4,31,"The winners of last round went after the castles that were under-targeted the first time around (9 and 10) while ignoring the castles that were over-targeted (7 and 8) and slightly bidding up on the castles that were 2nd most important (4 and 5). That leaves castle 6 as being the most likely attacked castle, so I'm ignoring it. From there, I expect 4 and 5 to start getting ignored with 1 through 3, so there's an opportunity to get those for cheap. If I get those, win 10 and win either 8 or 7 that puts me above the 28-point win level."
101,2,3,3,3,21,17,2,3,24,22,Last times winner but more even alignment
102,1,1,1,1,1,20,1,1,34,39,Ties are wins
103,1,1,1,2,4,5,36,36,12,2,"7 and 8 seem like a sweet spot for points vs competition, and I want to put in enough to beat most people who came to the same conclusion. At the same time, I want to make sure I don't get beaten by tiny troop commitments to the other castles. I figured 9 would be a nice bonus to sometimes get."
104,5,5,5,3,3,19,1,2,27,30,"Based on the last two games, those with less troops were overwhelmed. I figure most people will leave 9 and 10 relatively open, and 1-5 will be given 4, to take out the 3's from round 2. Let's see what happens!"
105,3,3,14,4,18,15,3,15,4,21,Randomish
106,2,3,1,5,16,28,6,9,18,12,Troop deployments to low point castles are just enough to tie up enemy troops while focusing on the mid to upper range castles that are worth the most. Don't over dedicate to 10 as people are drawn to the easy number.
107,1,9,20,29,15,10,2,8,5,1,"Distribute to all, try to find a place where numbers will be thin."
108,1,1,2,2,26,10,15,15,26,2,"The total point possibility is 55, so you need 28 to win. From there, troop (resource) distribution is a mix of math (what are the best combinations that can lead to 28?) and human behavior speculation (metagaming). Castle 10 is a trap and a good way to get your opponent to waste resources, since they are working with incomplete information, so I threw only 2 troops there (to minimize my investment while hedging against other players who choose 0 or 1). Castles 1-7 add up to 28, so a popular strategy may be to aggressively claim them. The 26 in Castle 5 is designed to disrupt that, as players who go for this strategy may emphasize their investments in Castles 6 and 7, and will be afraid to over-invest in 5 without hedging earlier castles accordingly. Meanwhile, there are enough troops in castles 6-9 to yield likely wins, while hedges in the lower castles may secure additional value. "
109,1,1,1,1,1,23,23,24,24,1,
110,2,2,2,11,16,16,26,16,5,4,"It seemed to me that the chance of winning castles 9-10 is relatively low, since many warlords will send more troops there. I focused more strength on the mid-range, castles 5-8. chose mostly uneven numbers (rather than rounding at 5, etc) in hopes of beating warlords who divided by 5s or 10s. And I sent at least some troops to every castle, since this guarantees a win against a warlord who sends 0 to any of them-- making that number greater than 1 for each castle, since many players will send a minimal force to those castles. "
111,2,3,4,4,21,21,21,22,1,1,I sacrificed 9 and 10 hoping that my enemy would focus a lot of soldiers on them and instead tried to capture a lot of of the mid value castles.
112,4,1,5,10,25,0,0,0,30,25,"Trying to pick up 5, 9 and 10. Get enough value in the early battles to pick up over half the points."
113,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,99,0,Just Cause
114,3,6,9,11,13,14,18,22,2,2,"55 total points and 100 troops means just fewer than 2 troops per point. Assuming opponent uses same math, I will overemphasize the lesser valued castles and hope she goes big."
115,1,1,1,6,7,20,27,35,1,1,I wanted to win the middle castles
116,1,0,0,14,20,2,2,2,29,30,I'm dumb
117,1,1,0,1,1,5,10,25,55,1,
118,4,8,4,27,2,16,17,18,2,2,
119,1,1,8,10,13,1,26,30,4,6,"I took the winning strategy from the first battle royale but then redeployed a few troops from castles 1 & 2 to castles 9 and 10. My thinking is that most players will be trying to beat the winning strategies from game 2, and won't be considering the game 1 strategies as much. Essentially, my hope is that I'll be ""zigging"" while others are ""zagging""."
120,3,3,5,5,3,16,17,16,16,16,"you need 28 points to win. I maximize my chances of winning 10 points 100% of the time in castles 1-4, concede castle 5, then hope even distribution wins me 3 of 5 in castles 6-10 versus a field that allocates 30 plus to a single castle. "
121,1,1,1,1,22,25,5,5,23,16,Using last results. Gave up castle 4 and redistributed higher..
122,2,5,0,11,3,19,22,4,28,6,"Choose who I want in my main coalition based on trying to have some overlap and differences with both previous rounds, but come up with 2,4,6,7,9 without too much further thought. Allocate 85% of my army to this coalition to not leave others undefended (except 3, out of spite)."
123,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,99,0,0,"You need to get points, and probably the only way to do that is to win a house outright. I am guessing that someone will do 100 for 10 and 9, so guessing 8 will be the one where people don't apply 100."
124,2,2,2,10,1,1,25,25,30,2,"Maximize the troops that could take 28 points, and the others are 2 to cleanup places where my opponent sent only 1."
125,1,1,1,1,10,10,2,20,20,34,Try to create as many options to get to 28 as possible. Goal is to win 2 out of the top 3 then pickup enough of the rest to get to 28+
126,2,2,2,2,11,11,2,22,44,2,"I was looking for four castles that would add up to 28 points, the minimum required to win. I found I could not do this without castle 9. I chose to leave out castle 7 because 5 and 6 should be easier to get. I sent token forces to 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 10 to force my opponent to keep those covered. That left me 88 troops. I sent half of those to castle 9, which I assumed would be contested heavily. Half of what was left was sent to castle 8. The remaining troops were split between 5 and 6."
127,2,2,4,7,9,11,14,15,17,19,"Added up all the VPs to be had (55) took 100 and divided it by 55 (1.8). This is how many soldiers each VP is worth. I then multiplied the castle number by 1.8, rounded and skewed it towards the high end a bit for people who employed the same strategy."
128,1,0,9,15,0,20,25,30,0,0,
129,1,1,1,21,1,1,22,24,26,2,"I figured a lot of people would go 10 on each, and this would consistently beat those ones. I also guessed a lot of people would put two on each of the lower ones to beat out the one you are forced to put there, so I made sure to take that into account. The second question for me was the people who went a bunch in top half and left one each to the lower ones so I knew I would need to adjust the numbers to favor something would also win against someone who went 1-1-1-1-1-19-19-19-19-19 because that seemed like it would be like the second most common formidable strategy. 

The last thing I considered was that because you need 28 points to win and the easiest way to there seems to be 9+8+7+6 the easiest way to get there. I ignore the ten because other people will dump a bunch of points there and either way I will need to  get four numbers total as 10+9+8 only gets you to 27. This strategy pretty cleanly beats both those strategies. To beat this you would need to foresee it probably and get 9 at least. I think if you went for a 10-9-8 strategy and just low balled a bunch of other numbers hoping to get one you might beat me but you will lose to everyone playing 10 on everything so I think this is the most stable that I can come up with."
130,1,3,1,7,4,12,32,3,34,3,"Lots of folk went for 7-8 or 9-10 previously.  I figure few will go for 7-9.  With those in the bag, I need another 12 points.  I'm hoping for 2-4-6, but also spreading out my options to get lucky against a poorly defended 8, 10, and 5."
131,1,0,1,6,22,12,8,14,6,30,"I chose a strategy that could beat each of the top 5 from the last two times, could beat an even distribution, could beat a focused attack at the top, and could beat a (10,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,30,30) strategy.  The first strategy I found was (1,2,2,18,1,6,2,33,11,24).

Then, I used random sampling to see if I could find strategies that would beat my strategy.  Out of a sample of 200, I found 84.  I compared these 84 against the original 13 strategies, and found 1 that beat all of them.    This strategy was (0,1,1,6,22,12,8,14,6,30).

However, your entry form won't let me put 0 for castle 1, so I switched castle 1 and 2.  This seems to work just fine as well."
132,2,2,2,5,12,2,5,28,32,10,
133,1,1,12,1,1,20,1,1,34,28,Anticipating another adjustment after the second round. Min/maxing numbers to reach the 28 point threshold.
134,3,4,4,11,12,16,20,21,4,5,Try to pick up a couple with my 3-5 at the ends and then win 4 of the middle ones where the strength is.
135,2,3,0,5,7,12,16,18,18,19,Idk let's see if I win
136,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,"Need 28 pts to win, expected value of n pts/ 55 total its per castle. Rounded up higher pt castles."
137,1,1,13,9,2,2,23,22,2,25,"Going all-in on Castles 7, 8, and 10 gives 25 points of the 28 needed to win. After that, I just split my troops between 3 and 4 with the hope of winning one of the two battles and pushing myself over. Castles 5, 6, and 9 each got 2 troops so that I could win those if the opposition left them undefended."
138,1,1,1,1,15,15,20,25,20,1,
139,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,23,33,36,"Just win 10,9,8 and get lucky somewhere else."
140,3,4,5,6,9,12,16,21,23,1,"I place 1 troop #10 assuming my opponent will allocate a large contingent of his troops, thus increasing my chances of winning a majority of the others."
141,1,1,15,1,15,1,20,2,20,24,"Focusing on the odd numbers offers fewer points than focusing on the even numbers, but if I can capture one even as well, I can pull ahead.  "
142,8,10,7,5,11,13,3,15,26,2,"I wanted to have some troops at every castle to have a chance to win any of them.  I think some people may try to just win the 4 most valuable castles, as that wins you a majority of points, so I wanted to make sure I hit one of them hard to pre-empt that.  The rest was pretty much random!"
143,2,2,2,8,9,11,12,18,18,18,
144,1,1,1,11,13,4,29,32,4,4,"I picked two more than the winning deployment from a previous round for all the top castles, assuming that most other players would pick one more than the winning deployment.  This made me run out of soldiers by the end though, so the least value castles are pretty weakly defended."
145,1,1,1,14,12,12,14,14,30,1,Not a lot of thought went into the deployment.  trying to get castles 9-7 most of the time.
146,1,1,1,11,2,21,3,26,3,31,"I really decided to only focus on castles 10, 8, 6, and  4 since those would win it for me.  I started thinking of doing 30, 25, 20, and 10 respectively, but if a lot of people like doing multiple of 5s, adding one more to each could give me a lot more wins.  I figure some people would put 0 in 1, 2, and 3, so I put one in each just in case.  The remaining 8 troops went pretty evenly into 5, 7, and 9."
147,2,2,9,12,14,16,2,2,2,39,to score 28 points 90% of the time
148,2,2,2,7,7,27,27,2,10,14,"Paired scouts to 1/2/3 - not worth more troops, but good to snipe or deny a 1-troop snipe. Common practice in last games has been to focus on 4 castles, with a small number spread to others. This strategy is designed to narrowly defeat any small force at any castle, while focusing on castles 6 & 7 (usually ignored, but form a good base to combine with other towers) and increasing numbers of troops to castles 9 & 10.  Castle 8 is almost ignored, anticipating others will focus efforts there."
149,1,1,1,1,23,23,23,23,2,2,Trying to capture all of the middles and maybe steal the top 2
150,3,1,1,1,1,1,2,26,27,37,"Get 28 points with the fewest number of castles possible (10, 9, 8 & 1).  Try to defend those with as many soldiers as possible and leave 1 at the other castles in case any are left undefended. "
151,1,1,4,4,10,12,14,16,18,20,
152,3,5,7,2,2,15,18,20,0,28,"The Name of this game should be 55. Why? Well for a similar reason why your website is called 538. 55 is the number of total points a player could win in this game, but 28 is the number of points a player needs to win, like 270 in an election. If a player can get to 28 points then he automatically wins. (Said player can win with less if there are ties). 

Instead of viewing the board as 55 points I can win, I view it as 28 points I need to win. That being said, each point is worth 3.57 of my soldiers (100/28). I am making an assumption, that most people will undervalue lower point tiers. Putting 3, 5, and 7 soldiers on tiers 1, 2, and 3 respectively, 15% of my soldiers, but gains 21% of the points needed. A major victory for my army. 

4 and 5 are tricky. They are needed to win if you go the 10,9,5,4 strategy (last season's winners did). But they were overcommitted to those areas. Being wary of losing them due to people overcommitting on them, I left them at 2. Every soldier needs someone to guard his back. Pick up the easy win vs those who bid 0 or 1, but don't lose out on those playing the 10,9,5,4 strategy. Probably a minor loss for my army. 

6,7,8 are much easier. They deserve 21, 25, and 28 soldiers respectively (using 3.57x *point value). But they are also VERY underappreciated by both past winners, and the average submission. Capitalizing on this, I can gain these points by using a decent amount of soldiers, but near the amount they deserve. Another major victory for my army. I can count on wins by using only 15, 18, and 20. 

This leaves me with 9 and 10. And 28 troops. If history tells us anything, its that people like castle 9 more than they like castle 10. This is an either or situation, you won't win both unless you overcommit. I place all 28 in castle 10. 

"
153,2,2,5,13,16,1,7,16,33,5,"I looked at the distributions of the two previous wars and picked out some forts that have a potential to be left unguarded and put a couple more troops in there, while approximately splitting the difference between the two sets of winners, hoping that others might have the same approach, allowing myself to have a couple more in those key forts mentioned above. "
154,1,1,1,1,1,3,33,20,20,19,"To achieve over 50% of the available points, you must either win either the lowest 7 or highest 4, or otherwise mix and match point values up to 28 points. I have chosen to fight hard for the 4 highest values, in hopes that most spread their troops more conservatively. Because Castle 7 is included in both of these combinations, it is likely to be highly contested, so I have placed a third of my troops there. 1 troop was distributed to all castles in the lower 6 to snag extra points in case of similar strategies, or to those which chose not to contest certain castles. This strategy only works if I am able to win all 4 top castles, so this beats the winning Feb 2017 strategy of aiming low, but not the Jun 2017 strategy of splitting between 9/10 and 4/5. That makes this strategy considerably more risky and dependent on what the general trends are among the other participants this time."
155,1,1,1,2,8,10,20,25,30,2,The Art of War
156,2,2,2,7,11,14,17,17,15,13,"Designed a strategy that would beat both the average strategies from the last 2 battle royales, without winning any castle with a high excess of troops."
157,1,1,9,9,1,15,2,2,29,31,"Mostly guessing. 6, 9, and 10 seems like an efficient way to get close to 28, and hardly anyone's going to put lots of troops to both 3 and 4."
158,3,3,11,11,4,4,19,20,21,4,"The past winners placed 2-3 troops at each of their worst bases, by placing 4 I could acquire those bases at a lower marginal cost of entry. I wanted to try and take 5 bases total, and wanted to make sure that each of those 5 bases had more than 10 so that I could beat out the average person who just runs 10's across the board. I avoided the 10 spot because I think the average person will overplace value on that and overallocate their troops there."
159,1,0,1,2,2,2,23,23,23,23,People seem to try to get clever by guessing which castles others will give up on or go all-in for. Maybe being not-clever and just going for the high-value ones counters that?
160,1,1,2,11,3,26,2,27,26,1,"I choose to ignore castle 10 since it will be often stormed by a great number of troops. I think castle 8 is more strategic unless a lot of people applied the same strategy as me. Round numbers (or numbers ending in 5) are never a good bet since a lot of people will most likely put that number and you'll find yourself tied, so one upping those is to me a good strategy"
161,5,1,0,0,0,0,0,32,31,31,"I anticipate a backlash against the deployment of troops to the highest castles given the data from the last war. Because of this, committing roughly a third of my troops to each of the three largest castles should overwhelm the majority of opponents. 8 has historically been one of the most sought after castles, likely being used to deny narrow strategies like mine a victory, so i will fortify it with an extra troop. 

Additionally, if i win 8/9/10, only one other point is necessary, and the first castle has been historically poorly defended. I send my final troop to the second castle, because someone who has committed more than 5 troops to the first is probably less likely to have fortified the second."
162,3,3,6,13,15,17,4,15,15,9,Sort of a smooth mound shape but I pulled back on #7 to boost the tails
163,1,1,1,15,16,13,3,1,21,28,Guesses.
164,2,4,8,12,3,19,2,6,12,32,Just wanted to beat the best of the last two battles...
165,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,"It was based on relative value. Castle 10 has 18% of the total points (55) so they get 18 troops, 9 has 16% of the total points so they get 16 troops, and so on. "
166,3,3,3,6,6,25,25,27,1,1,
167,2,3,5,7,12,17,20,25,5,4,Sounded good to me
168,1,4,4,5,30,5,7,7,7,30,"I put the last 2 set of winners in an excel spreadsheet.  I set it up with functions so I could see which battles I won and who won the war.  I noticed the main strategies focused on: 
a) 10, 9, 5, 4
b) 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2
c) 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 2
I decided to make sure my strategy would defeat each of the past top 5 players.  I found a few combinations that worked and noticed that they had something in common:
brake the cores of the main strategies, but don't give up all the others in the process.
For some reason, 5 and 4 seem to be the most popular choices, so it seemed essential to steal one of these.  I chose 5 because it's worth more points.
The 2nd part is trickier, because now half the players go for 9 and 10, and the other half go for 8 and 7.  I decided to be bold in 10, dedicating far more troops than almost any of the other players would. Then, put enough of the remaining troops spread across the other three options.  This is to increase the odds of winning at least 2 of three.  
The remaining troops are placed among the last numbers to get victories against people neglecting them.  "
169,2,3,4,0,6,15,10,26,34,0,Clustered to win as many points against last time's winners.
170,1,3,3,4,4,7,8,13,20,37,Roughly exponential increase for each next castle
171,1,1,8,10,16,16,22,24,1,1,
172,1,1,1,1,1,1,19,22,25,28,Proportionally allocated to the top four based on point values
173,1,1,2,12,3,18,4,24,5,30,"Go strong to get to the 28 point win count from castles 10, 8, 6, and 4, and scatter other forces to avoid losing other high value castles to just 1 or 2 soldiers. Given that strategy, allocate soldiers in proportion to the castles' value. Specifically, targeted castles get 3x their value in numbers of soldiers while the remaining castles get half, rounded up. Given 100 soldiers, the specific numbers just sort of shook out that way.

Round 1 winners went strong for upper-middle and low numbers to get to 28 -- something like 8,7,5,4,3,1. In response, round 2 winners went strong specifically for 10, 9, 5, and 4. I'm countering those while still focusing on my primary strategy: try hard to get my primary targets to get to 28 points, while giving myself a chance on the other castles if I happen to lose one or two of my primary targets. Running against the previous 10 finalists I'd finish 9-1, and the one loss is 28-27, so mine may be a popular winning strategy as a counter to those, just as the leaders in previous iterations of the game used similar strategies to each other.

------

I wonder if you could provide the average score for the previous winners, and other people who might have had a higher average result, but won fewer duels. "
174,1,1,1,2,3,26,30,30,3,3,Highest value avoiding copy cats and those who will put everything on 10 and 9
175,1,1,2,2,2,16,16,30,3,27,Not too sure.
176,1,0,0,2,21,22,3,24,27,0,"Key is to get to 28. Wanted to stack as few castles as possible to increase probability of winning those. Left 7, 4, and 3 as contingency plans in case someone was doing the same."
177,3,5,4,4,12,12,26,26,4,4,Overvalue the undervalued
178,1,1,1,1,11,12,15,17,19,22,"I assumed that a reasonably common strategy would be trying to spread the troops proportional to the castle scores (so, basically scaling up from a 55 point triangular spread). The idea here is to cede 10 points every game to build a more top-heavy spread to specifically counter those players and some variations on that theme."
179,1,4,0,0,0,0,27,0,34,34,
180,2,2,2,5,9,11,11,11,11,36,trying to win the higher castles without leaving any empty and pick off the 10 on each strategy
181,1,1,1,9,11,14,17,18,15,13,My goal was to build a strategy that beat the average of both of the previous two rounds of raiding.
182,5,5,6,19,23,7,7,19,4,5,I just picked a strategy that would beat the top 5 in the most recent battle and also the top 5 in the first battle
183,4,8,9,11,3,2,5,2,27,29,Trying to get undervalued castles for cheap while leaving highly contested ones on the board
184,1,1,1,11,16,21,21,26,1,1,I tried to win just enough castles to get a majority of points by focusing on winning the predicted least competitive castles by one person. I guessed that most people will use multiples of 5 more often than other values and made all my troop counts 1 more than a multiple of 5.
185,2,3,4,12,1,24,4,26,2,22,"Pretty random, some psychology"
186,1,2,2,2,6,9,18,18,24,18,We know nothing.
187,1,1,1,3,12,17,5,27,3,30,We're in the Endgame now.
188,2,2,2,2,10,10,28,12,30,2,"Somewhat randomly. Generally speaking, either try to win or don't. Not a lot of in between."
189,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,55,Tried to guarantee 10 and get what I could with the rest
190,3,1,2,1,3,3,16,19,26,26,"Go with non-derivatives, sacrifice 5's and 6's for 7's and 8's. In the words of Brienne of Tarth, ""Don't go where your enemy leads you."""
191,3,6,7,8,2,13,15,1,33,12,It's what I submitted last time. I did a bunch of simulations two years ago but I'm not doing any more work today for this glorified rock-paper-scissors match.
192,2,5,10,1,1,16,3,31,27,4,Random to avoid overthinking the problem
193,1,1,1,27,27,1,1,1,20,20,Achieving the required points while committing to the fewest possible castles to ensure that those who committed troops elsewhere would not be able to achieve the required amount of points.
194,1,0,1,17,20,1,2,23,32,3,saw the best ones from the last 1 and combinated.
195,4,4,10,14,15,14,15,16,4,4,"4 each seems like it will win 9+10 pretty frequently based on past distributions.  Then, big numbers at 8,7,6,5 all will lose to even bigger ones of course, but will do well against people who followed either of the strategies of the past two winners - big numbers on 7/8 or on 4/5 - and hopefully win enough of the castle 3 in addition to take the battle.  "
196,2,2,5,10,14,15,20,20,10,2,"devalued the highest due to probability someone would pick those, and the lowest due to lower value.  Centralized in the middle, hoping to win the majority of 4-8.  Put at least 2 in all categories so if any are using a similar strategy but ""giving up"" certain castles I will win those, and used 2 instead of one to try and outsmart any with the same strategy using 1 soldier."
197,1,2,2,2,11,13,3,32,31,3,"Assume many will either go for 7/8 or 9/10, and those that do will weight heavier on the higher of the 2, so trying to split the difference and win one of each pair.
3s to try to pick up a few where people put 1 or 2, then using the majority of the rest to try for 5/6, which outweigh 1-4 combined."
198,1,1,1,2,16,20,24,2,30,3,"Focusing on 9, 7, 6, and 5 as they represent half of possible points"
199,1,1,1,1,1,12,12,24,1,46,I dunno
200,1,1,1,5,10,20,25,30,3,4,Shooting for mid numbers (adds up to more than the extremes put together). Still put a few in the top numbers in case of a steal.
201,1,0,0,14,22,2,2,24,33,2,Why did you force at least 1 unit to go to castle 1?
202,1,1,1,1,1,1,4,20,20,50,
203,3,3,3,3,12,12,3,29,29,3,"I choose to concentrate on towers 8 and 9, hopefully winning them almost all the time. I should also win towers 5 and 6 much of the time making 28 points for a victory. If I miss one or both of 5 and 6, I hope to make it up with scouting forces of 3 soldiers which may be more than most scouts."
204,1,1,1,1,1,1,9,20,30,35,I want castle 10 baby!!!!!!!!!
205,1,0,0,0,0,9,10,10,35,35,"For the goal of winning 28 points, I plan to take castle 9 and 10. Then win any two among castle 7-9. I'm avoiding castle 4 - - 5 as they seemed to be hotly contested in prior matches"
206,1,1,0,9,14,20,25,30,0,0,"Just give up on the biggest ones, probably a waste "
207,1,1,4,12,20,2,2,6,30,22,"Randomly, kind of based off the previous renditions. "
208,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,22,37,40,
209,1,1,4,5,9,12,12,18,12,26,Seemed like a good idea at the time
210,1,0,0,12,14,13,0,0,31,29,"I expect eight and seven to be hotly contested, so I left them open along with three and two giving the opponent 20 points out of the gate. One required a value greater than zero, so I gave it one. With an average of three, I will likely lose one  and the opponent will have 21 points. I plan to take four and five which were hotly contested in the last round and may be less so in this round. Six will be a toss-up. Nine and ten must be taken. If I can take four, five, nine, and ten, I will have 28 points and the opponent would have 27."
211,1,1,1,7,10,12,14,16,18,20,"More troops for higher value castles, but not ignoring lower value ones"
212,1,4,4,13,9,10,10,23,19,7,"I am no game theorist, but I figure a decent concentration on the higher and middle numbers couldn't hurt."
213,1,0,14,0,0,18,0,0,33,34,"Going big on castles 10, 9, 6, 3. It is designed to ""just barely"" win against what I figure is an average deployment. It matches up well with the top castles of Round Two but struggles against some of the top castles from Round One. As you might be able to guess, I don't expect people to go back to the Round One strategy."
214,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,1,Prioritizing high-end targets while keeping out of Castle 10 battle - marginal gain on that castle is not worth the battle
215,1,1,1,15,17,19,21,23,1,1,
216,1,0,0,12,0,12,25,25,25,0,"In order to assign the maximum number of soldiers to selected castles, from all castle combinations that sum up to 28 with just 4 castles, I choose to ignore castle 10 and concentrate forces to 9,8,7 (25 on each) then I just need one of 4,5 or 6 so I had to share the rest 25 soldiers to those 3 castles. To increase chances I placed 12 soldiers to 4 and 6 and the last remaining to castle 1( that was unintentional, since I had to place at least on soldier to castle 1)"
217,2,5,4,3,7,11,11,26,4,27,Gut feeling
218,1,1,4,13,13,18,22,22,3,3,
219,1,1,13,2,2,14,2,3,31,31,Trying to win 10+9+6+3=28 points
220,1,1,2,12,16,3,2,2,28,33,"idk, put all my eggs in castle 9 and 10 and hope the rest works itself out"
221,2,2,2,30,30,2,2,2,15,13,
222,31,31,31,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,Trying to get the top three castles and then hopefully catch one other castle my opponent didn't put any troops at
223,2,3,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,11,random assignment
224,3,6,9,12,15,16,15,12,9,3,I think the middle castles will be where the war is won
225,1,2,5,6,16,9,4,17,36,4,Chose a deployment that defeats all previous top 5 deployments.
226,1,1,2,9,15,8,18,21,0,25,"Mean of previous winners, then equalization of ROI on all but Castle 9 because I don't like the location of that property ."
227,3,5,7,7,8,10,10,10,20,20,"Used the previous results, and tried to pick the opposite strategies"
228,2,2,3,4,8,11,12,28,29,1,"Have at least 1 at every castle, aim for capturing castles 6 - 9, much higher value than the lower value counts, and hopefully less contested than castle 10"
229,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,I reinforced the higher value castles with 1 army from each less-valued castle in the hopes that I could both win some high-value battles against warlords trying to win a greater number of low-value castles and some (more?) low-value battles against top-heavy warlords.
230,4,4,4,4,4,22,13,22,21,2,In hic signo vinces
231,2,2,3,12,18,16,30,8,5,4,"I need 28 points of castles to win.  I started by thinking I would sacrifice 8, 9, and 10 because IF I could win the rest, I'd hit my 28.  Recognizing that putting more troops in the remaining high value castles left the low valued castles relatively weak I decided to further reduce the troop deployment at the low end to slightly increase deployment in the 8pt castle.  This is an interesting game because I need to decide which bucket of castles I want to commit to while leaving a token force at the rest. There's a subtle rock paper scissors element to this this game but with an extra depth of how sharp are your scissors, how heavy the rock, and how thick the paper.  I'd like to know how viewing past battle strategies of winners affects this outcome.  If the previous results weren't published, would this third round have a distribution of troops similar to the first round?"
232,2,4,6,7,8,15,23,35,0,0,"Idk, could work"
233,1,5,10,1,1,19,2,23,34,4,"28 by way of 2,3,6,8,9 instead of 4,5,9,10 or 1(2),3,4,5,7,8.  Mixed strategy which emphasizes 3 and 6 over 4 and 5 and splits the first two rounds emphasis on 7,8 and 9,10 by focusing on 8,9"
234,1,2,4,6,8,11,14,16,18,20,"True percentages, rounded down and subtracted 1 for less valuable castles 2-5, and rounded up and added 1 for more valuable castles 6-10"
235,1,0,0,16,18,1,1,20,21,22,
236,1,1,1,1,4,12,20,28,20,12,fun
237,1,1,1,14,21,2,2,25,28,5,Weighted heavily to certain castles in the aim to almost always win those points
238,1,0,1,1,25,1,1,1,35,34,"Copy the same strategy as last time, but more extreme (thinking people are going to go back to strategy 1)"
239,1,4,1,1,1,1,1,30,32,28,going for the top 3 and hoping to get lucky and get one other
240,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,31,31,31,
241,1,1,1,8,10,14,17,19,16,13,"I guessed how people would react to the last round, and reacted to that"
242,2,2,2,3,3,11,31,36,6,4,"Trying to capture the sweet spot of being 1 more than multiples of 5, or just 1 or 2. I bet this game play very differently with prime numbers of troops and castles, that are not easy to divide."
243,1,1,11,1,1,1,1,21,32,30,I want to beat troop allocation based on castle % worth. And also equal split. The base naive case.  While at the same time I want to have an edge against some of the winners in Feb and June meta.  I win against 40% of Feb winners and 20% of June winners.  The meta unlikely to repeat.  My max overpay is +16. Median overpay is -2.  It’s a more concentrated strategy. June had a more displaced strategy. Feb is more concentrated. Meta will swing back towards concentration.
244,1,1,3,3,1,22,1,8,27,33,"I was bored in class, troops weren't going to deploy themselves"
245,3,4,7,1,19,1,27,1,36,1,"I needed to contest every castle in the event someone did not place any troops there and I could get it for ""free"". Then I figured out there are 55 total points available, so I needed to get 28 to win. If you divide the points available of each castle by the 55 total, you can get a % of points for each. If you then multiply by 100 you get what each castle is ""worth"" in manpower. I figured if I roughly double the ""expected worth"" in manpower, I will win the castle more often than not. I then picked a combination of castles to focus on that if I won them, would give me 28 pts. I wanted to avoid #10 because I expect there will be a lot of fighting for that one, so I concentrated on 9, 7 and 5, to give me a good base of 21 pts. I then focused on the bottom 3 castles because I expect them to be lightly guarded. If I happen to ""steal"" a castle from someone since they put no one there, even better."
246,1,0,1,2,12,21,27,32,2,2,"never gonna win 9 & 10, don't want 1-4, split the rest leaning higher for higher values"
247,1,1,1,2,3,5,8,14,25,40,loosely based off fibionnaci sequence
248,1,2,3,4,15,15,15,15,15,15,"balanced chance for the higher scoring castles, and can still get points for those who neglect the lower scoring castles"
249,1,0,9,0,0,20,20,20,0,30,"You must win at least 28 points. Since the given strategy seems to be to avoid large commitments on 10, and attack 4,5, and 9, I chose to deploy my troops to 10, 8, 7, and 6 in large numbers, concentrating the rest on 3 to offset losing 1 and two. Its a high risk strategy, because losing just one of the higher values will result in a loss. "
250,1,2,2,2,4,4,1,28,28,28,"I'm punting 7 towers.  Looking over past results, I'm choosing towers that were punted most often - I put enough into lower towers in case someone went on a one tower strategy."
251,2,2,2,8,9,10,12,22,31,2,Wag
252,1,1,1,13,15,19,22,24,2,2,"Castles 1-3 not worth winning
Castles 4-8 are enough to win
Two troops at Castles 9 and 10, in case they are undefended."
253,2,3,5,8,2,22,23,4,27,4,"Well, I didn't use *actual* game theory, that's for sure!"
254,1,0,0,0,0,0,24,25,25,25,Control the four top castles that add up to more than the rest.
255,4,7,5,21,21,12,20,7,3,0,"Took average of top 5 winners from first battle, average of top 5 winners from second, and guessed the trend of the top 5 from this battle would look like [0, 0, 0, 15, 16, 0, 0, 0, 39, 30]. Used evolutionary machine learning to find a strategy that would consistently give highest scores against slight variations on the predicted opponent strategy."
256,1,1,3,5,7,9,13,16,20,25,"Disregard game theory, and just kind of wing it?"
257,2,3,4,5,6,6,32,31,5,6,"Focused on 2 in the middle, never lower than 2 to beat the 1s deployed and heavier on two important"
258,1,0,0,3,3,21,22,23,24,3,Captain Chaos
259,1,0,0,6,17,17,6,4,23,26,War
260,1,1,1,22,9,22,1,22,1,20,guess work
261,1,2,2,2,3,18,18,26,26,2,"Avoid 10 as the most likely to be contested. Put 2 as a mininum to beat anyone just throwing 1's in. Focusing on 6, 7, 8 & 9 as together they defeat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 10. "
262,1,4,5,5,5,10,10,20,20,20,
263,1,1,2,15,2,2,17,27,31,2,"1)Focus on 4 castles that give 28 (just over 50%) and sacrifice biggest prize castle 
2) don’t give away any castles for free 
3) anticipate opponent strategy to send at least 1 to all castles and send 2 to hedge in case one of key 4 is lost 
4) calibrate weights to beat simple backloading "
264,3,1,6,6,8,22,13,15,24,2,"I'm not even going to pretend I can guess what everyone else is doing, so I kind of focused on getting 6 and 9, but might have enough from 7, 8 and the lower end if people overcommit there."
265,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,0,Sac the queen!
266,1,3,5,7,10,12,0,19,23,20,"Slight tweak on EV 1, 3, 5 etc. deployment"
267,1,5,1,1,1,1,1,28,29,32,
268,1,2,4,6,9,12,14,16,17,19,"I want this to be fun, not work, so I avoided any serious algorithm and went with my gut. Seems like you should send at least 1 to every castle, and given the linearly-increasing value of each castle, it makes sense to send numbers that follow that pattern.

THEN YOU GET TRICKY and spice it up with a few extras taken from the lower valued castles and given to the mid-range castles, because I figure there's other lazy nerds like me who'll do the same thing as I did in paragraph 1, and I WANT TO BEAT THEM AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR ADVISORS.

Thus, castles 6-8 got one extra soldier, who will provide The Edge To VICTORYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!"
269,3,3,3,3,3,20,20,21,21,3,
270,5,5,5,5,5,5,10,20,20,20,
271,1,1,2,1,20,5,2,1,32,35,"I suspect folks will counter the previous round(s) strategies, so I want to zig while they zag and capture the big prizes. "
272,1,1,1,19,19,17,17,18,3,4,idk tbh
273,2,10,10,2,20,2,2,24,2,26,This was all a fluke.
274,1,1,1,2,1,15,20,3,29,27,"The trick seems to be strategically giving up on castles while committing the least number of troops to the ones I'm playing for in order to succeed. Four seems to be the best number to go after, while also strategically leaving 2-3 troops rather than one in a few locations in order to scoop up easy victories against foes committing 1-2. I'm a little concerned that I'm committing too few troops to Castle 6, but that's above the mean from each of the last two contests."
275,2,4,5,8,4,11,16,8,23,19,Macro economic model of optimizing against market inefficiencies as surmised from previous rounds
276,1,5,2,1,22,1,26,34,3,5,Trying to avoid over-spending on castles the opponent will deploy to.
277,1,0,0,9,0,15,0,35,40,0,Cheapest way to 28 total points. It did make me place one troop in castle one for some reason. Would rather have put that soldier at 4.
278,1,2,4,12,16,7,14,14,17,13,"For each castle, I took the average from the top 5 winners from the past two versions of this and rounded to the nearest integer. That total came to 102, so I used my judgement to bring 2 numbers down by 1. Because those two rounds differ greatly in winning strategy, this strategy is probably just bad against everything."
279,7,9,9,11,13,0,0,0,51,0,It adds up to >20 points and I don't think anyone's gonna care as much as I do about the ones I chose? Idk though
280,1,3,3,3,3,26,4,26,27,4,"Winning 6, 8 and 9 will all but assure me victory. If I lose one of them, I hope I have enough at castle 7 or 10 to pick up one of those instead"
281,1,2,2,11,23,8,2,21,28,2,"Ensure I will win against all 0 deployments and try to dominate 9, 8 and 5."
282,5,6,8,10,13,15,5,28,6,4,"Lose the middle, win the ends"
283,3,4,6,11,11,21,11,11,11,11,"I didn't want to overthink it. The last rounds, switched based on where people loaded up, so I wanted to do a fairly even distribution to take the ignored categories while maintaining something in each category to not give anything away. I loaded up on 6 to try to win it since the best ones in the previous rounds each essentially gave away 2 of the top 4 so winning the 5th highest could be very beneficial."
284,3,3,11,15,18,11,22,6,4,7,Random numbers with the majority of troops deployed to castles with medium values (4-7).
285,1,1,1,1,15,21,24,1,1,34,"Completely unscientific and eyeballed it based on the last two results.  You need 28 points to win and at least four castles to make up that point total.  I chose 10, 7, 6, and 5.  It seemed like castle 10 was undervalued in the first round and corrected more in the second, so I'm anticipating that 10 will be more contested in this round.  The other castles are the lowest value castles remaining that I need to get to 28 points.  It appeared that the second round saw a greater emphasis on higher point castles and a more dispersed strategy (based, poorly, on averages).  I put remaining troops in those castles assuming that enemy troops will drop off on castles 5 and lower. The remaining castles are just to cherry pick any undefended castles and force enemy troops to send at least 2 to capture."
286,5,5,10,15,10,20,24,5,3,3,"I wanted to prioritize taking castles 1-7. Taking every single one of these castles will provide me with 28 points, just over half. I chose to escalate with the number and hope others would focus on the ""big"" castles"", leaving me to win with the small ones. However, I still sent some troops to the small ones in case someone went all in on the same strategy. If they do, I'm hoping the small amount I sent+the variation in the troops I'm sending will allow me to win those matchups."
287,3,4,0,10,0,16,7,22,10,28,watching Game of thrones taught me to just go for it!
288,1,2,3,17,14,4,3,2,21,33,"I picked a strategy similar to the previous champion, but modified to be able to beat the previous champion."
289,10,1,1,1,1,1,1,39,20,25,
290,1,2,5,5,7,20,20,20,20,0,Sacrificed Castle 10 in hopes of winning slightly-lesser castles
291,2,2,7,9,2,15,17,20,21,5,"I will probably lose 5 & 10 (15 points) and win 6, 7, 8, & 9 (30 points) against most value-based opponents.  I left castle 10 with enough resources to hopefully win that castle against similar counter-value-based strategies."
292,2,2,2,2,2,20,20,20,20,10,"Essentially, splitting the difference between the first two rounds by having even numbers across castles 6-9, a fair number on 10, and token troops on 1-5."
293,1,1,7,9,1,1,30,48,1,1,I wanted to assure myself of winning 20 points and invested heavily in those castles unlikely to be the principle investments of others.
294,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,18,25,1,"By giving up castle 10 entirely I can distribute more troops elsewhere, with at least 2 soldier per point for castles 1-9.

I did leave one soldier on castle 10 as a counter play for anyone who sends noone for similar reasons"
295,2,2,2,6,16,20,20,22,5,5,"Looked at the two previous, split the difference, was too lazy to tweak deployments."
296,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,"To beat me, you have to place 11 soldiers at 6 castles. You can't. I win!"
297,1,1,1,18,1,1,18,26,32,1,Getting to 28 points
298,1,3,7,17,17,18,22,5,6,4,"I kept enough in the top three to catch any that decided to sluff those, then loaded up on 4-7.   10 is just not SO much more than 6 or 7 that it justifies a huge commitment."
299,1,2,2,5,5,5,21,26,32,1,My strategy is to invest heavily in castles 7-9 to get to 24 and then try to secure the other 4 points by divesting my remaining points and hope to capture enough.
300,3,8,11,21,3,4,3,4,22,21,"I focused on getting to 28-half of all points and other than a few scouts, focused on winning the fights that would just barely allow me to make it"
301,3,0,7,10,20,0,30,30,0,0,"I targeted 6 castles that would get me 28 points. If I go 6/6 on those ones that I bet big on then I win (doesn’t really feel like a good strategy, but I wanted to see how it would play out)"
302,5,6,8,5,10,2,2,15,23,24,How do you know which risks in war are the right ones? You wait to see if you win.
303,1,0,1,7,1,20,3,27,14,26,
304,1,1,1,1,1,10,15,20,20,30,"The first 4 castles are only worth as much as 10 combined, so I'm willing to give up the smaller ones for a higher point castle. Then just lower the troops accordingly, weighted towards the higher points."
305,5,4,12,12,14,20,3,3,5,22,DAVE ALWAYS WINS
306,8,0,0,0,0,0,0,31,31,30,"I am just trying to get to the minimum amount of points to win: 28. I found the combination with the least amount of castles I possibly need to win and dumped all my points into these 4, forgoing the rest completely as they are not important in my winning strategy. Also, based on the previous 2 games, I decided to put the least in castle 1 in order to stack 8, 9, and 10 to the fullest possible."
307,1,0,0,2,23,4,4,28,32,6,"Picked some castles to go for, crossed my fingers no one else goes for them"
308,1,1,1,3,5,13,1,1,37,37,"Prioritize high value targets.  Eschew low value targets.  Skirt mid-value conflict.  Steal low-mid value clinchers.  Try not to optimize based off of previous datasets, to avoid both adjustments, as well as adjustments-to-anticipated-adjustments."
309,1,6,5,1,1,1,20,1,32,32,I'm trying to get to 28 points as often as possible.
310,1,3,4,8,10,13,16,1,34,10,"I assigned troops proportional to castle value, then sacrificed castle 8 and a bit of castle 10 to target castle 9. Just to change it up."
311,1,1,1,5,1,10,1,20,0,60,Must win 28 points
312,2,5,8,10,13,2,26,30,2,2,Took the winner of Round 1 and moved 1 soldier to beat it
313,1,1,2,16,20,2,3,1,32,22,"Optimized against second set, then locally optimized against both sets, accounting for the new mandatory troop on castle 1."
314,1,8,9,15,3,3,5,6,28,22,"Intuitive distribution, then found local maximum"
315,1,1,1,1,1,18,21,26,29,1,All castles should have at least 1 soldier just in case someone sends 0. Castle 10 will be the hardest to capture so put the minimum. Castle 6-9 will need to be captured to win if castle 10 is sacrificed. Proportionally distribute remaining soldiers to castles 6-9 favoring the higher scoring castles slightly.
316,1,3,5,7,9,13,16,18,15,13,I took last round's averages and shaved the lower half to give more juice to the top castles.
317,1,1,1,10,13,17,25,30,1,1,
318,1,1,1,1,10,15,20,25,25,1,Giving up on the 10
319,1,1,1,1,3,7,1,21,1,63,
320,1,6,2,12,2,18,2,24,3,30,"I wanted a strategy that would defeat any median-style strategy, and chose to win the even-numbered castles.  I put a small number of troops in the odds numbered castles to beat those that sent 0 or 1, which was common in the first try, and then allocated the troops to even-numbered castles proportionally to their value."
321,6,1,1,1,1,38,39,1,1,11,Castles 6 and 7 seemed undervalued so I focused troops there and put a middling 11 on castle 10 in case a significant number based their strategies on the previous battle.
322,2,2,2,3,5,21,21,2,21,21,"I couldn't put a 0 in some of the columns (the webpage rules wouldn't allow me).  So knowing that, I put heavy focus on winning 4/5 top levels and put slightly more than minimum on the lower ones (hoping to pickup a couple scraps)."
323,2,5,5,1,23,1,1,25,35,2,My goal was to win 8 and 9.  With that I only need 11 more points to secure victory.  I sacked 6 and 7 given that they were low in the last one and more people are likely to focus on those.  That leaves me with needing to win 5 and 3 and then either 1 and 2 or 4.  I sacked 4 given that it was high in both prior events.
324,5,7,8,10,15,25,30,0,0,0,Willing to concede three castles with most points in hopes of winning all others (28 of 55 possible points).  Assigning most soldiers to those with most points among the group that I was aiming to win.
325,1,1,2,4,6,8,10,20,40,8,Thought it looked cool
326,0,0,0,14,17,20,23,26,0,0,Ignored 9&10 and chose the fewest castles past that to give me more than 28 points and weighed troops by value
327,2,4,5,7,9,11,12,14,16,20,guess
328,1,1,2,2,2,3,4,8,18,59,"f(1)=1.218, f(x)= f(x-1)^1.4.  Rounded result, mostly. "
329,0,0,0,13,15,18,26,28,0,0,Distributed my troops evenly through 4-8 which will give me 30 points each time banking on that I have more troop in those stations giving the other opponent 10-9-3-2-.
330,1,4,7,9,11,13,16,18,20,1,"most people will load up heavy on the castles worth more points, i went for an even distribution slightly skewed towards the higher value castles. Based on the numbers 1-9 percentage of 45. IE 9 was 20%. I just took one off the lowest value castle in case someone did the same thing and put it on the 10."
331,2,1,1,10,12,2,19,25,25,3,"The idea was to win 7,8, and 9 as well as one of 4 and 5. That gives me either 28 or 29 which wins. The others are to make sure i dont lose to a 1 or 2"
332,7,8,8,1,1,18,18,1,37,1,Win Castle #9 and the other castels that seem overlooked.
333,1,1,1,1,1,23,5,33,30,4,Because it's the best
334,0,1,1,20,22,4,5,6,10,31,"Before looking at the historical data, I settled on a 10-9-5-4 distribution, with individual soldiers heading to remaining castles so as not to completely cede any points. Once I looked at the last match, I saw that this had been a popular choice for the leaders, confirming its soundness. My draft distribution lost against those leaders, though, due to weakness in the 8-7-6 range. I also noticed that the bulk of forces were being sent against castle 9, producing uncertainty around the success of even a healthy amount of force there. To adjust, I reduced allocation to castle 9, redistributing those troops across castles 9-8-7-6, but left my highest concentrations at 10, 5, and 4. I ultimately ceded castle 1, because I assessed the value of an additional soldier to win a 4+ castle as higher than avoiding the 1 point loss (and most likely, the Battle for Castle One will be a quiet 0-0 match, yielding a free .5 point anyway)."
335,12,12,12,12,12,14,26,0,0,0,I figure the bulk will put their points in to the top 4 if i can win everything else i should be good to go
336,1,2,2,12,15,16,4,26,18,4,"I punted on Castle 10 assuming that a large number of people would simply deploy troops largely in direct proportion to the number of points, but still put more that 0-2 in the hopes of catching some that decided to punt entirely. I grouped the bulk of my troops around the 5-9 castles as I assume most would do, but hope to have just a few more quite often. To do this, I picked another one to punt on (Castle 7) guessing that that is a sweet spot in terms of points I can lose and where I think others will load up. My strategy is going to require me to win almost all the castles to which I committed significant troops (which is somewhat risky—but I think really the only way to go) or to steal a lot from the castles I committed few (but not zero) troops to. That seems like an unlikely path to victory but a decent hedge against someone that stacks all of their troops on Castles 7-10. I am quite worried about a 25-25-25-25 or a 27–26-24-23 deployment, so I decided to put 26 in Castle 8 which should give me a victory over all of those. Also a little worried about those deployments along with 1 troop at other castles, so decided to go with 2s mostly on the punts."
337,5,7,8,10,15,20,26,3,3,3,"Try to win 1-7, and sneak a few victories over 8-10."
338,1,6,1,13,1,21,24,1,31,1,"I chose 5 castles (9,7,6,4,2) to try and win 28 points most often and sorted my troops according to point values per castles. Then I took 1 troop from each castle and allotted to other 5 castles (just in case opponent sent 0 or 1 troops to those castles also)."
339,0,0,0,0,5,20,20,20,20,15,
340,1,1,2,7,3,12,7,22,8,37,"The crux of the 4 castle strat is taking castle 10. So if I get it, then have even deployment in the other castles, I'll beat everyone who tries it hinging on 10. If the majority of people hinge the 4 castle strat on 9, I'm screwed. "
341,1,1,3,8,8,2,2,22,22,31,
342,0,0,1,3,1,1,22,23,24,25,"This is my second entry. I created it as the counterpoint to my strategy (sort of) in the first. Here, I must win 3 of the 4 largest and then pick up 4 more points."
343,0,0,0,0,20,23,0,30,27,0,"There's no way to win without at least four castles, so I focused on winning four and tried to optimize versus earlier distributions. "
344,0,2,3,11,14,15,5,5,35,10,
345,4,5,6,12,21,26,26,0,0,0,"I did the math and discovered that 28 points is the magic number. 8, 9, 10 get you 27, and 1-7 get you 28. So, I punted on 8,9,10, expecting most people to stock up on those and give them a free victory there while they use the majority of their troops. Meanwhile, I'll be happy to take all the smaller castles because 28>27. I debated going for 8,9,10 and 1 to take 28 points, or even 2,3,4,6,7,8 to make 28, but figured my first thought would win more often than the other two, which would be harder to distribute troops since 8 would take so many to guarantee the victory. "
346,1,1,1,1,10,28,28,28,1,1,
347,0,4,4,4,7,26,4,21,26,4,This is the same strategy I used to defeat the Persian Army in the 5th Century.
348,2,2,12,2,2,12,2,2,32,32,"Win 10, 9, 6, 3 = 28 pts = win. few troops to others just in case."
349,2,0,0,0,0,17,18,18,20,25,
350,7,7,7,13,13,7,11,11,11,13,
351,0,0,4,0,11,0,30,31,0,24,"I came up with about a dozen different strategies. Strategy A was an even distribution (10 per castle), B was weighted (2 for Castle 1 up to 18 for Castle 10); C was weighted to beat A-B, D could beat A-C, all the way until strategy O. After Strategy O, I couldn't make another distribution that could beat N plus the other ones I had already made. It's banking on chaos and people not wanting to overpay for Castle 10, thinking they can take Castles 6-9 for a little more points"
352,0,1,1,10,0,0,29,29,30,0,"Exact victory points, fewest required wins, avoid 10."
353,0,0,1,2,20,22,3,24,28,0,"Resubmission of my last entry, which required me to put at least one on castle 1. Want to concentrate my efforts on reaching 28, the required score for winning the battle. The others are slight contingencies, in case someone else does the same thing."
354,0,0,10,0,0,20,28,32,5,5,Because I'm the Grandmaster.
355,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,24,36,35,"limit losing troops, look for highest return on investment"
356,0,1,2,16,21,3,22,32,2,1,Savviness and wordsmithographyophillia
357,2,0,11,12,15,22,8,1,28,1,"Focusing on a few moderate-to-large castles. Expected to lose 2 every time, 8, 10 almost every time. About half of 1 and 7. Most 4, 5, 6, and 9."
358,3,4,6,11,13,7,6,21,26,3,"Many people are math adverse. When dealing with 100, people may be inclined to use numbers like 5, 10, 25. Numbers like 6, 11, 26 may get close wins and save more soldiers to put into other spots. "
359,5,8,11,1,1,17,21,1,34,1,Aim to get 28 points. Look to beat prior winners. Rely on intuition and a quick excel check (keep time invested at ten minutes).
360,2,3,4,20,26,15,10,10,5,5,"There are 55 points available for capture.  The first to 28 points wins.  No one can win unless they capture AT LEAST 4 castles.  Most people would likely try to capture the most valuable castles first and weight their troops towards those objectives.  But those who spend 50ish troops on castles 9/10 only have 50ish troops to spend on the remaining 8 castles, needing to win at least 9 points, between those 8 castles. I could see a 2, 7, 9, 10, strategy working well enough compared to last year's 4, 5, 9, 10, meta.

 By all but abandoning 9 and 10, i should like take the other 8 castles in most scenarios mainly due to the fact that the enemy had no more troops to spend. I put substantial enough troops in each castle that no one can steal cheap points without investing a fair amount into those castles in the first place.

Against last year's winners, I would have won:
Vatter: 36-19
Winder:  33.5-21.5
Shafer: 36-19
Schmidt: 35-20
Trick: 36-19
"
361,0,0,11,12,17,0,25,0,35,0,"I need 28 points to win, castle 1 and 2 have little value, I feel like people will value 10 and or 8 highly. 10 seems like a median number and something someone would throw at 3 or 4 so I went with 11 and 12. It's really a win all or lose scenario for me. Hopefully people spend resources out instead of concentrating. 10,9,8,1 seems like the most common strategy for people to really go after, I think I can overwhelm the 9 slot and forfeit the others while getting what I want"
362,0,11,11,12,12,13,13,14,14,0,"This won't work, but I am attempting to avoid over-optimisation by ignoring all previous data. Accept the loss of 1 and 10, and try to win on average against the rest, with a slight bias to higher value targets"
363,6,3,3,16,3,22,31,4,4,8,"I found that having more troops at castles 1, 4, 6, 7, and 10 would be enough to win, so I focused on those. Also, those castles were not as heavily contested last time. I did just enough in those castles to win most games last time then allocated the rest of the troops to the other castles."
364,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,100,0,Nash Equilibrium
365,2,2,2,2,2,30,0,0,30,30,Felt like it.
366,3,3,4,6,6,3,3,34,4,34,
367,0,11,12,0,16,18,2,3,2,36,
368,0,0,1,17,22,2,1,1,33,23,I slightly modified Vince Vatter's distribution from Round 2. I'm very original.
369,0,0,0,7,10,0,0,24,28,31,"Subscribe to the ""Barely Win or Lose by a Lot"" theory."
370,1,2,3,0,6,12,0,30,32,14,"I wasn't really going for castle 10, but thought I would beat some people.  I really wanted to pick up castle 8 and 9, so I put a lot of troops there.  I thought I would pick up some easy points by not putting ""0"" in the early castles.  I though people would waste a lot of troops on castle 5, based on last time, so I didn't put a lot there."
371,0,0,0,2,21,21,21,2,2,31,Try and get the 10 and then the 5-7 which weren't as heavily contested
372,1,1,2,18,19,2,4,3,30,20,
373,0,0,0,4,1,16,1,16,31,31,To win.
374,1,2,2,2,2,11,26,26,26,2,"Giving up the highest value castle to counter people putting a lot of chips on it. Instead securing the next 3 (9, 8, 7). Trying to put enough soldiers on the other ones to counter the strategy of one guy per castle if they spent too much on higher castles. Arggh gonna lose."
375,1,2,4,5,13,18,23,27,6,1,"I tried to adapt to the changes from the previous wars. I believe castle 10 will be the most hotly contested, so I only want to gather the table scraps there. I think castles 5-8 will be the most important to win this time."
376,6,7,9,12,15,18,23,3,3,4,"My strategy does very well against the first iteration of the game, and is hit-or-miss against the second. I would guess that different people will emphasize different iterations in their thinking, so I came up with a plan that does reasonably well against both and very well against anyone who reverts to the thinking of the first iteration."
377,5,5,13,14,17,21,22,1,1,1,"I waffled between heavily targeting castles 8, 9, 10, and 1 to get to 28 points, or my submitted strategy of trying to nab castles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.  It seemed to me that using more troops on fewer castles was the more simplistic option, so I thought that more people might try that option, so I decided to go the other way and spread my troops out over more castles.  It was fun to think about, but I doubt I'll do very well.  I'm not mathematically inclined."
378,1,1,1,1,4,6,21,21,22,22,"Just general intuition on how people will likely make their deployments. The low tier castles get one each, since about 30% of people send 0 to these, and most people that send any send more than one. Mid-tier receive few as well, but a few more, to win about 30% of battles there. The high tier castles receive more, but rather than clumping into 6-7-8 or 9-10, they are distributed closely between 7-8-9-10. I expect to win 2 of these 4 most of the time, and 3 of 10 quite a few times. 

I know, not very scientific. But the best generals seek to understand to mindset of their opponents, and tailor their strategies to beat them. I am curious to see how this fairs."
379,1,2,2,2,13,13,20,7,27,13,i liked the numbers
380,3,4,5,17,3,19,3,19,3,24,"This is a defensive strategy. What is the most straightforward way to gain a majority (4+6+8+10) and then a defensive distribution to pick off lone scouts in the advent that you get overwhelmed in the core 4. As an added bonus, the strategy beat the top 5 of both previous years."
381,0,7,0,8,15,0,1,32,32,5,"I'm going for 2,4,5,8,&9 = 28 for the win... However... if someone is really going after 8 and 9 too, my 5 soldiers on 10 will hopefully be enough to carry the day."
382,1,4,5,8,16,16,22,22,3,3,"try to conquer  5,6,7,8 and win"
383,1,2,1,1,1,11,12,31,35,5,"I earn enough victory points from castles 6, 7, 8 and 9 so I focused on them.  I put at least an army in each castle to prevent free wins.  I only sent a few armies to castle 10 because I felt others would devout a lot of troops there.  I didn't want to waste mine in a large battle there but I put some in case others have my same strategy of avoiding a large battle at castle 10.  I also put a great deal in castles 8 and 9.  I wanted to nearly guarantee victories at those castles."
384,3,7,2,13,2,19,22,25,3,4,"I wanted to aim for what I hoped was a less conventional 1-2-4-6-7-8 win, with enough scouts at the others to swing a few battles."
385,2,4,4,1,2,24,26,3,31,3,Gotta take >half the points baby
386,1,0,19,1,1,21,0,23,0,34,
387,3,3,3,3,11,11,16,21,26,3,You’ll never know
388,0,0,8,19,17,12,4,4,4,32,"Trying to win 10, 6, 5, 4, 3.  Probably not a strategy to win the whole thing but should be good enough to be in top 50%."
389,1,0,19,1,1,21,0,23,0,34,
390,0,0,1,19,0,19,1,25,1,34,
391,0,11,0,0,16,19,22,31,0,1,"There are 55 points on offer. But you only need to win half plus 1 (.5 actually)
My strategy was to secure the minimum points for victory by winning the 5 Castles. 8,7,6,5 and 2.
Hopefully avoiding the high value castes will allow me to put more troops on lower values and win the war.
Throwing 1 soldier to castle 10 in the event my opponent is thinking the same way."
392,5,7,9,3,8,5,27,31,2,3,
393,10,11,10,10,11,11,11,11,10,5,"Pretty much evenly distribute my forces winning any castle left undefended, while sending one extra guy to 5 castles that accumulate enough points to win on their own. Sacrifice Castle 10 as I don't need it to win and hope others will focus on it"
394,6,6,5,15,20,20,28,0,0,0,Seed the top scoring castles and focus heavy on winning the middle ones. The castles worth few pointe I assumed few people would go for
395,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,12,"Starting with Castle 1, it is the first 9 terms of the Fibonacci Sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34).  ΣF9=88, 100-88=12 troops remain for Castle 10.  I don't think I'm likely to win, but isn't it more important to be beautiful?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93lrosBEW-Q"
396,0,0,11,13,2,21,21,21,0,11,"Gut feeling, picking the less selected castles by either of the previous two rounds."
397,2,2,11,11,11,18,21,22,1,1,I focused on winning the midtier castles while still sending a few troops to others in case they completely abandon them.
398,2,3,3,5,17,19,19,2,2,28,"Try and win 5, 6, 7, and 10 against most people, which would give me the 28 points needed to win. "
399,2,2,2,15,8,8,28,33,1,1,"1. In order to win one only needs to get 28 points. 
2. Most players will send most of their troops to the top two or three castles, with minor amounts sent to castles at the bottom end of the scale. Most players will probably ignore castles 5 and 6. 
3. Occupying castles 4-8 will win the game for a player. 
4. Player should make only a minor attempt to capture castles 9 and 10, and should throw the lion's share of their forces against castles 7 and 8. They should also send a small force to each of the low scoring castles, as insurance in case of failure. 
5. Player should send at least one soldier to each castle, just in case the enemy ignores them. 
6. Player should send two or three soldiers to castles 1-3, to prevent a single enemy spy from capturing them. "
400,8,12,13,13,13,14,0,27,0,0,"I hope to allow my opponent to take the top two and the 7th castle while preserving those forces to have enough to counter what I expect to be a smaller amount dedicated to castles 1-6 and 8, thereby getting a majority of points and castles. "
401,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,"I figure everyone else is goint to overthink it, so I just went with a basic strategy. Since every castly is worth progressively more, I decided to put progressively more troops in each castle"
402,1,9,12,6,5,26,5,5,7,24,
403,1,3,4,15,15,16,16,26,2,2,"Two basic ""coalitions"" can get to 27 points.  The first is 8+9+10 (or mods of 9+10 lower numbers).  The second is 8+7+6+(7--either 5+2, 3+4, 4+2+1, 5+3, 5+4).  Because the winners all took the first last time, I'm focusing on the second.  I give extra protection to 8 because it is most likely to be challenged by an 8+9+10 strategy.  I need to win all of 8, 7, 6 and at least one of 5, 4, with 3,2,1 insuring against the loss of either 5 or 4.  The oddity of my approach is that it would lose to the past winning strategy, but I expect that the _reason_ that strategy won is that most people attacked the 8 rather than devote so many resources to the 4 and 5, and that people will shift toward 8,7,6 and away from 4 and 5 this time.  I keep a few guys on 9 and 10 as insurance against similar strategies that are more purist."
404,0,2,0,16,3,19,3,0,33,24,Did not overthink it.. the strategy likely relies too heavily on taking castle #10 with a modest deployment
405,4,5,5,6,7,9,11,16,27,10,"Reverse variant of Benford's law. Law typically only covers numbers 1-9, so I gave castle 10 the average weight of 10 soldiers, then reversed the probabilities of the Benford's law digits putting 9 highest and 1 lowest, and divided by the new total weight of 110.

Probably suboptimal, but who knows."
406,0,0,0,16,1,1,25,28,28,1,
407,0,6,0,0,0,0,0,33,33,28,"I wanted to win 28 point by attacking as few castles as possible. By focusing as many troops as possible on castles 8, 9 and 10 and choosing a low value castle that people typically don’t commit many resources to, I hoped to win the majority of bouts. "
408,0,1,3,17,21,17,14,16,5,6,"I devised a strategy to beat all ten presented in previous iterations, then I added that strategy and devised the way to beat all ten plus that solution.  I repeated several times adding improved solutions to my list to beat."
409,1,2,3,16,23,2,4,6,23,20,
410,1,1,1,1,1,8,14,19,26,28,nearly abandoning the first 5. then load up 6-10. Winning 4 of those 5 guarantees a win. probably won't win
411,0,1,1,17,20,20,20,20,1,0,Dominant the middle/paint like in basketball
412,1,1,1,13,5,11,20,20,20,8,"I saw the most potential value in the 7-9 range so I wanted to focus there, while guaranteeing the exploration of any opponent who sent 0 to a castle. "
413,2,2,6,9,12,16,21,24,4,4,I added up to 100... i guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
414,4,8,14,2,12,10,22,6,3,19,Why Not
415,1,1,1,15,20,20,20,20,1,1,-
416,4,4,4,4,11,22,33,7,6,5,I'm one step ahead of everyone else
417,0,1,2,3,4,5,9,20,21,35,
418,0,2,2,3,15,15,15,15,18,15,
419,2,2,8,2,2,18,2,2,31,31,Bc 2 > 1 and 10+9+6+3=28
420,1,1,1,1,17,12,22,23,21,1,"Winning big on castles 7, 8, 9, and loosing most of the rest on the assumption people will increasingly ignore 7, 8, 9 based on past data"
421,5,7,9,13,1,16,16,17,15,1,Trying the maximize the chance of at least winning 28 points.
422,2,1,11,8,2,17,24,5,3,27,Trying to maximize a few different areas (victory points) while not giving many easy wins to others.
423,0,2,2,4,4,7,7,7,35,32,"Try to obtain 9 and 10 over all others, and for those who can beat me in one or both; punish them by taking other castles they hopefully skimp on."
424,0,1,2,17,20,17,14,16,6,7,Beat previous submitted solution (plus all others considered...but with smaller margins on many others).
425,1,7,1,1,13,17,22,36,1,1,"At least 1 soldier at every castle to take easy points from undefended castles, but mainly focusing on castles 8,7,6,5, and 2 which yield enough points on their own to win a battle with half the points + .5"
426,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,"On average, you can deploy 1.8 troops per castle point. This strategy sends troops to each castle based on their values."
427,2,9,3,10,3,18,3,22,3,27,straight up guess
428,1,10,13,13,13,15,2,27,3,3,"Think I need to send somebody to every castle, but potentially concede 10,9,7,1; hopefully sweep remainder."
429,0,3,3,13,15,16,17,17,10,6,"The lower numbers are obviously less valuable. 10 and 9 I armed moderately, so that they could take a small force, but I didn't want to waste forces that could be used on the medium-high numbers. Those are the meat, and if past trends prevail, 10 and 6 may very well be good enough to beat many people anyway (for 9 and 10)"
430,0,0,7,5,6,17,16,17,16,16,
431,1,1,1,1,15,20,29,30,1,1,think it could work
432,1,1,1,1,15,15,15,15,15,21,Need to make sure you have someone at every castle. This beats most other combinations because it sends a man to every castle
433,1,1,2,2,2,2,20,20,20,30,"No strategy, just tried to weight the higher points castles higher"
434,3,3,8,3,21,5,26,10,10,11,"I wanted to defeat the previous champions. The first round winners won by going heavy in 4,5,9,10. The 2nd round they went heavy in some combination that didn't include 9,10. I went for go for 7, 5 and 3. With average values in 8,9,10 in hoping to get one or two of these."
435,0,2,1,1,19,22,25,28,1,1,"Stating the obvious first- there are 55 possible points, meaning you need 28 points to guarantee a victory.  I feel like Castles 9 and 10 are overrated since Castle 10 is worth the same as Castles 8+2, 7+3, etc.  My strategy was to win castles 5, 6, 7 and 8 for a total of 26 points.  If accomplished, I only need to win ONE castle out of castles 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 to guarantee a victory.  I dedicated the vast majority of my soldiers (94) to get castles 5-8 while the rest only got 1 or 2 soldiers each.  I actually put 2 soldiers on Castle 2 since it has the lowest value, I feel like putting a 2 there gives me the best chance of getting it.  Putting 1 soldier each at 9 and 10 may seem silly but I still may get points against some other similar strategies. Even winning half of those castle 9 or 10 points would put me over the top.  Anyway I have an English degree so the pressure is on you, math people!  I wish you good fortune in the wars to come."
436,2,2,2,1,1,1,1,32,31,27,"Win the big castles, grab a couple other points somewhere."
437,2,4,7,9,17,19,30,4,4,4,With the power of my brain.
438,0,0,15,2,2,2,23,25,2,29,"This strategy should beat proportional strategies and rotations of proportional strategies, and I think that these will be the most common type. This will probably lose to some similar strategies (very concentrated on a few highest numbers and some low numbers), but by betting 2 on some of the middle numbers we'll hopefully beat more similar strategies than we lose to. We'll get crushed by strategies that beat us on 10 and 9 and also win a lot of low numbers, but I think these strategies will be least common."
439,5,5,0,0,0,0,0,20,30,40,Castles 3-7 are pretty lame
440,2,2,6,5,15,18,2,12,3,35,"Based on the last couple of series I tried to take advantage of what people were conceding without overspending. The most valued castles (9&7) I largely abandoned in favor of 10, 8 and 6. If I win those three and a couple low point castles I can secure a win."
441,1,1,3,1,10,10,18,24,31,1,"I believe that most individuals will go for the 10 point castle, and i will concede it, in order to focus on the next-highest value targets. With the assumption that I can win most but not all of the castles of high value below 10 points, I then distributed 3 soldiers to the 3 point castle in order to try to add to my value with an easier to acquire target. I also added 1 soldier to the remaining castles in order to take it from individuals who simply leave it alone."
442,7,9,11,13,15,16,1,26,1,1,"I used one soldier for the 7, 9, and 10 castle. If someone chose not to attack a given castle, it is worth my deployment of at least one soldier there. 

But then, I figured that castles 10, 9, and 8 would see the highest deployments. My goal is to get to 28 points... so even if I lose castles 7, 9, and 10, I can still win by winning every other castle (with one VP to spare). I have a lot of excess soldiers to win all of these. I chose to fight hard for castle #8, figuring there was a decent ""bang for your buck"" return on that castle. 

So I distributed my remaining 97 soldiers, giving slightly more to the higher-worth castles, and prayed!"
443,1,1,1,1,1,15,17,19,21,23,"Calculated relative worth of each castle and deployed troops accordingly, then removed all but 1 troop from lower half of castles (to get more points from enemies who chose 0) and distributed them evenly over the high value castles, because I have no clue which ones will be highly sought after this round."
444,0,3,5,4,10,17,0,0,29,32,"I assumed everyone would group-think back to the round before the last one (focusing on 7 and 8).  Given that, I mostly copied the strategies of the last round , assuming that everyone else is ""too smart"" to try it."
445,1,1,1,1,6,0,0,30,0,60,"Many players won't choose lower point castles, so it could be potentially easy to get several low-point castles and gain as many points as the largest castle."
446,26,11,11,11,11,12,15,1,1,1,"It's sort of a counter-intuitive strategy that ignores average return per troop deployed in favor of attacking three strategies I think will be most common. Ironically, castle #1 is the pivot for many strategies that I think will be most common, so it's more important than the return of 1 would indicate. I think a lot of people are going to try to reach 28 troops by taking 10,9,8 and 1. This makes sense intuitively, because you're defending the fewest number of tiles, but it would mean glossing over 7-2, and I doubt many of those people would put more than a quarter of their troops on castle 1. I'm also trying to maintain enough troops on 7-2 to beat anyone who just assigns 10 troops per castle. If a player is taking a rational approach and assigns troops in such a way as to average out the expected return for each troop deployed, it would look something like 2,3,5,6,9,11,14,15,17,18 with .5-.67 expected return per troop and a slight preference on sending leftovers to the higher number castles. I would still get them by sweeping 1-7. I've also defended against even more extreme players like me by leaving 1 troop going to 10, 9, and 8 to get a quick score if they get too cute by leaving those blocks totally undefended, and I'll almost certainly still take #1 for the win hahaha. My strategy is most vulnerable to a more moderated version of my strategy where less resources are attributed to castle 1 and distributed over the mid range, but I would expect them to lose a high percentage of games to people pursuing the 10,9,8,1 strategy. Overall, I think my strategy will be successful."
447,0,0,0,11,0,0,26,31,32,0,"I went for the less ""psychologically significant"" castles which would still give me a significant advantage. I sent 11 troops to 4 as an additional bonus in case someone is close to me in the upper ranges, or sweeps all the castles I didn't send any troops to - and since 11 just barely beats the simple strategy of sending 10 troops to each castle. I sent 26 to 7 because 26 is one more than 25 (another round number I expect people to use a lot), and similarly I sent 31 (rather than 30) to #8. Hope this works!"
448,0,0,3,3,3,18,18,3,26,26,Focus on castles 5-6 and 9-10
449,6,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,31,31,"If I win the 10, 9, 8 and 1, I have 28 which is just enough to win."
450,5,5,10,15,15,15,15,10,5,5,"Compete everywhere, but not too hard for the low and high value castles"
451,1,1,1,1,1,10,14,19,25,27,"55 possible points, first 5 only get you 15. Just in case the other warlord did not use any on the first 5 I will win with one on each. For castles 6-10 I dispersed the rest of the troops with the number getting bigger as the castle’s value got bigger"
452,1,2,2,2,18,17,16,15,14,13,
453,2,2,2,15,15,15,15,2,2,30,"Basic bell-curve distribution, with a good amount on 10 to potentially tie at best with someone who puts a lot at 10."
454,1,19,1,19,1,19,1,19,1,19,"If you win the even numbered castles, you win."
455,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,Gave castles weighted amount based on their value
456,1,1,1,15,1,18,1,26,2,34,"Trying to secure 28 points via castles 10, 8, 6, and 4. If other responses rely heavily on similar castles...hopefully a few stragglers in each castle provide a fighting chance. This loses to strategies that sell out for castles 6 or 8 pretty dramatically but I think those will be few and far between."
457,0,0,4,13,16,8,14,14,17,14,Took the average of the previous two winners and made a team that could beat that.
458,0,0,0,0,20,50,30,0,0,0,"6 seems like a good number. And I didn't want to send any lone soldiers off to die. I expect to win Castle 6 around 1/3 of the time, so hey, that's like 2 points. I'm feeling positive about it."
459,0,2,8,2,2,14,2,2,34,34,"Never send just 1 so that you win vs any solo scouts, focus on 9 and 10 to try and insure 19 out of 28 required points, aim for over average on 3 and 6 to try and secure the 8 additional points needed for a win while hoping that victories over singles allow for any shortfall, sacrifice the 1 pt castle as winning it fails to make up for a split anywhere else that will determine the game."
460,2,3,3,15,18,23,24,1,1,10,
461,0,0,0,1,18,21,0,22,36,2,
462,1,2,3,10,25,4,5,5,10,35,
463,0,0,1,2,3,6,8,15,25,40,More troops at higher point total castles. Abandon the smallest castles as they aren't worth winning.
464,2,2,26,13,30,1,3,10,5,8,I rearranged a previous winner's deployment and prayed.
465,1,2,4,8,11,15,26,27,3,3,Looks a bit better based on the data from the last two.
466,0,1,3,6,15,18,0,0,27,30,Focused on towers where 2nd game average was 2 soldiers or less per point
467,0,0,10,0,0,16,0,0,35,39,"I started with the averages and the winners from the last 2 rounds. Then I tried to craft a few strategies: a few random ones, some crafted to specifically beat the winners, some crafted to take advantage of historically undervalued spaces between winners and averages, - with some variations on how little/much to put on some of the lighter weighted castles. Then I sat down and went for a hyper aggressive strategy that had a single path to 28 points and would defeat all of the above hahaha. And so we end up here, with a warlord who styles him/herself also as an edgelord, and possibly did not do enough to account for beating strategies that were previously losing. "
468,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,30,35,"I only need 28 points to win, so I'm only investing my soldiers in 4 attacks to get me the 28 - the three highest totals plus one point."
469,0,0,0,15,17,2,3,4,21,38,"predictive to the human adjustment from round #2, I assumed flipped value on #9 and #10, otherwise assumed the meta deployment would be similar to before "
470,2,5,6,8,1,12,14,16,17,19,"There are 55 points on offer. With 100 troops, that means deploying my troops evenly per the points on offer requires sending ~1.8 troops for each point in the castle. Most people probably figured this out, so I looked where they would round up/down to get to whole soldiers, and I sent 1 more soldier than that to each castle. This strategy required 10 extra, so I gave up on castle 5, which was taking 10 soldiers. Then, I moved 1 soldier from castle 1 (which had 3) to castle 5, so that if they did some weird strategy with no troops to 5 I'd win it, and only was increasing my risk at a 1 point castle."
471,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,33,32,"I need 28 points to win, so I'm fighting hard for those 28 points."
472,0,0,0,0,11,11,11,21,21,25,Guarantee 10 and then assume no one else would expend more than 20 on any particular castle. Guarantee 9 and 8 on this rule and then spread the rest out descending.
473,0,0,12,0,0,22,0,0,34,32,"4-castle all-in no scouts.  Relative value. My min allocation has to be > 10 to beat naive even split.  My overpayment vs avg cost... I must win castle 9. The other castles I will overpay relative to my overpayment on castle 9.   Castle 3 +7, castle 6 +11, castle 9 +18, castle 10 +14. You really have to beat my contested castles.  Weakness is castle 3, but I’m at +7 and castle 6, +11. Beats all past winners."
474,10,10,10,10,20,20,5,5,5,5,"My strategy is people don't expect you to send troops to the small stuff, so they don't send troops there. The most troops are sent to the big ones, so your best chance of getting points is in the middle."
475,2,4,9,17,22,16,5,7,5,13,"I took the top 5 winners from the last 2 times, along with the averages for each castle from the last 2 times, then maximized the number of points scored if my distribution faced each of these 12 opponents. "
476,1,3,6,8,10,12,14,16,15,15,I split the difference between the average soldiers per castle from the previous iteration vs. roughly proportional #s of soldiers per castle value.
477,5,5,5,6,12,12,16,9,12,18,Hoping other warlords don't put very many in the early castles
478,2,1,0,0,0,0,0,28,33,36,
479,1,1,2,15,19,0,11,14,17,20,"I tried to plan a balanced attack of the high-value castles (7-10) and the low-value castles (4-5) with increasing troops in each category. Since castle 6 was ignored in both previous editions I figured most players would attack this castle, so I left it exposed to avoid losing troops there."
480,0,0,0,5,10,10,15,20,22,18,Maximize points from ties
481,1,3,5,7,9,10,13,15,17,20,Roughly their percentage value of 55 total available points.
482,0,3,4,5,1,8,15,18,22,24,Looks good to me!
483,1,1,11,12,1,20,24,28,1,1,I choose to send at least 1 soldier to each castle in case I could take the castle unopposed.  After that I decided to concentrate my soldiers towards 5 castles that could give me enough points to win (28/55).  I then distributed my troops according to the worth of each castle.  Finally I then added one extra troop to a castle in case I came up against someone using my initial strategy but without going for the undefended castles to ensure that I would still win.
484,0,0,0,16,20,20,21,21,1,1,
485,1,2,2,3,4,6,9,14,23,36,"I used the Fibonnaci sequence to provide a ratio of importance to each castle, starting with 0,1,1,2,3 etc. But I had 12 soldiers left over so i just added one to each castle except castles 9 and 10 where i added two soldiers."
486,0,0,0,0,11,4,0,15,35,35,Compared the strategy against a uniform deployment (10 / castle) and against the winner from second round.  Tried to get at least 28 points against both strategies.
487,0,0,0,7,8,0,0,35,35,15,
488,3,3,4,18,18,3,6,11,17,17,I looked at the top deployments from the previous rounds and looked at how they fared against each other. I then chose the best one and manipulated it until it beat all the others.
489,0,0,0,0,0,25,0,34,41,0,The minimum number of castles needed is 3 which have to add up to 23.  6 is app. 25% of 23 so 25 soldiers 8 is app. 33% of 23 so 34 soldiers and the rest go to 9.
490,0,3,8,9,13,5,28,30,2,2,
491,5,6,7,8,10,12,13,12,13,14,"Summation x+4, then just added random numbers to make it add to 100"
492,2,2,4,10,2,16,25,3,33,3,"I decided to leave Castle #10 essentially undefended, and instead focused on some of the less-worthy castles, especially #9 and #7, to get a ""winning coalition"" of six castles with around 30 points."
493,0,0,0,13,0,12,0,0,37,38,23 points are needed to ensure a win - Overwhelming top two castles can get to 19 and then I just need to pick up one more of the other castles to win. Splitting between two helps cover bases if I lose one of the 9/10 and also increases odds i get the one castle to push me over 23 if I win the top two.
494,2,2,8,2,2,16,2,2,31,33,tried to invest in 4 castles that I felt relatively sure of winning and conceded the rest. High risk appetite!
495,0,0,0,0,3,16,16,27,27,11,Sacrifice the low scoring to just barely overload the mid-to-high tier castles
496,0,1,1,1,12,15,18,20,17,15,"3-4 points higher than previous average on higher point castles, at least 1 point per castle."
497,1,2,2,2,3,4,5,25,30,26,"Several troops on each in case someone puts down 0, and tried to have more than 1 since I suspect others will put 1 at each (at least). Thought 10 is a place where people would have very low or high, so I went medium to beat the lows but not waste too much. Trying to really capture 8, 9, and the misses to add up to 23 (winning number)"
498,1,1,9,9,18,19,20,21,1,1,Have 1 at each castle to win against anyone who doesn’t send at least one troop there. Then I put the rest at the mid tier castles because I just need to win a majority (28). Castles 4-8 are worth 30.
499,2,2,2,2,6,21,21,21,21,2,"The first 4 are so low value I'm giving them away, and the last one will be so hotly contested it's not worth fighting for. I put two there in case people put 1 - it's basically to take freebies while not costing anything substantial. I wanted to push all my chips in for the upper mid range ones. I went 21 for those as I think people might cap themselves at round numbers (20) for them, so it'd give me a slight edge."
500,1,1,16,2,2,21,2,2,26,27,"It's based on previous player's strategies. Focus on getting just enough points to win, while trying to pick up a few extra points on unguarded castles."
501,3,3,3,1,1,15,3,22,27,22,This combination had a good performance in tests against the data from past competitions
502,1,3,4,7,13,20,24,28,0,0,"I figured most people would choose increasing sequences, which means a lower numbers on 1-8 and more on 9 and 10. So if I put all my solders on 1-8 and beat them, maybe I'd have a better chance! :)"
503,2,2,10,2,30,36,3,3,6,6,"Trying to beat more people so i assumed that people either put a lot of soldiers in the higher castles or none  at all(1-5 soldiers ""just in case"")"
504,2,4,7,9,12,2,27,31,3,3,Built to beat Cyrus
505,1,1,1,1,5,15,20,25,30,1,"I'm assuming that most people will try to take Castle 10 - so I'm giving that castle up (with a single soldier in the event that I battle someone with a similar strategy who puts 0 in there).  From there, I gave preference to the remaining castles based on higher point values.  "
506,0,0,9,22,22,6,27,2,6,6,"I chose to give up 1 and 2 completely, focus on 4,5, 7 while putting enough points into the rest to hopefully stall non advances."
507,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,"There are 55 victory points up for grabs, so I found the value of each castle (castle #10 was worth 18.1% of the points; #9 was 16.3%, etc.). From there, I placed troops with those percentages as the base (18% at castle #10, 16% at castle #9). However, I would choose to round up the number of troops if the decimal would have rounded to 1 decimal point (ex: castle #6 is worth 10.9%, so I placed 11 troops). So basically just expected value. "
508,0,1,2,8,10,18,27,27,4,3,"11% 1st 4, 55% middle 3, 1/3 top 3"
509,5,5,5,10,10,5,11,30,11,8,"I felt like Castle 8 had the best view, so I really wanted to take that one."
510,1,1,1,1,17,19,19,19,21,1,"Prioritizing middle enough to win, safeguard others with 1 point"
511,7,1,1,1,0,0,0,27,28,35,"There are 55 available points among the castles, which means I need 28 to win. My strategy is to sell out for the top 3 castles, which gives me 27 if I win them all, then hope to take the smallest castle to push me over the edge. In addition I have a single scout sent to the next three smallest castles to try and steal one of those as well. Castles 5, 6, and 7 I will concede in favor of castles 8, 9, and 10."
512,0,9,0,0,0,0,0,32,32,27,
513,0,0,10,15,15,15,15,15,15,0,rather take the sum of the middle numbers over the first and last
514,1,2,3,3,5,5,14,12,30,25,Winging it.
515,1,1,10,12,13,14,15,16,17,1,Win the middle!
516,10,10,10,10,12,16,23,3,3,3,"It just felt right, people seemed to overvalue blowout victorys in high point castles"
517,0,10,0,0,15,25,25,25,0,0,"Only deploy to certain castles to win, hope to get lucky."
518,0,1,3,1,16,22,0,1,32,24,I am defending the most important places unlike Game of Thrones
519,0,0,0,0,16,19,5,26,29,5,
520,1,1,2,4,6,9,13,17,21,26,I made it porportional to the point value squared
521,1,1,2,3,12,17,3,12,22,27,ez money
522,1,1,4,4,10,20,20,20,20,0,Avoid wasting resources on a high contention battle (Castle 10).  Spread out on high value targets with less contention (Castle 9 through 6).
523,0,0,0,15,15,15,25,30,0,0,Play for the middle and push for the top but don’t over commit
524,0,2,0,0,16,6,19,25,0,32,"Way I figure it, the goal's to get 28 points.  Minimum number of castles you can get that with is four.  Best way to go about it is to abandon a couple of them completely so you can withdraw troops to ones that help the overall plan, while still targeting another lightly in the event that you lose an opening.  Ergo, this."
525,0,0,0,0,16,19,0,30,35,0,"I'm going all-in for getting the bare minimum points of 28 or more.  The fewest castles I need is 4.  10-9-8-7 is an option but lots of people will go after castle 10, so I'm going after 5-6-8-9.  Same number of castles, but I'm playing off the beaten path.  Also, 5-6-8-9 are all castles that are in fewer winning combinations, so they're more likely to be won by me.

The actual troop placements are based on the relative difficults I computed for winning those particular castles."
526,2,2,2,22,2,22,22,22,2,2,"go for 28 points exactly, figure everyone is sending at least 1 soldier to each castle, so i sent 2"
527,3,1,1,1,1,1,1,26,30,35,"The goal is 28pts, split them between the fewest number of castles weighted by worth of each castle. with a chance to win empty castles"
528,1,7,1,1,18,16,15,29,5,7,Used the first two deployments to try and create an optimal strategy that does well against both. Potato
529,9,9,9,10,11,12,12,15,5,8,"1 and 2 are not that important, but controlling the “middle of the pack” (4, 5,6,7,8) will give me an advantage over anybody else, no matter what they win. 9 and 10 are unimportant luxuries that will help, but are not necessary. 4 will help build up points, but as long as I have the “middle of the pack”, I will win."
530,1,1,2,1,1,11,11,11,26,35,
531,1,1,9,13,17,21,26,1,8,3,"I wanted to get the mid to upper values people wouldn't defend, while also tricking people who left 9 wide open."
532,1,1,1,1,16,16,16,16,16,16,"I win by having 6 castles.  meaning I should focus everything on 6 castles and spend no resources on the other 4. 100/6= 16.6 meaning I can have 16 in each castle with 4 remaining. I decided to put those 4 in the empty castles to attempt to win any uncontested castles. 

"
533,4,7,10,14,18,22,25,0,0,0,Get 28pts by focusing on the less valuable castles
534,0,1,1,15,18,2,2,3,31,27,"You need 28/55 points to win. Went big for the big castles since winning those two gets you within 9 points of victory. Then went for castles 4 and 5 since that gets me right to 28. No need to try and blow anyone out. Left token forces at castles 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 to capture them against opponents who did not attempt for them, while not wasting too many soldiers on the assumed large group who will try to rack up the middle-high values of 6-8. I know this is a strategy used before and there is also merit in avoiding the large castles, but I'm going with the all-in strategy on this one!"
535,1,2,3,0,22,6,27,31,4,4,"Looked to see where the past winners had shifted their troops from game 1 to game 2. Identified 5, 7, & 8 as places to pick up points while also noticing that Castle 6 is under attacked by 7/10 past winners. My hope is that those who only send a very token force to 9 & 10 (2 or 3 seem the most common) will lose to my 4 troops, while not costing me very much on the 3 main ones I focused on."
536,1,1,2,4,4,8,8,8,32,32,Powers of 2 are fun?
537,1,6,11,11,12,13,14,15,16,1,Assume opponent will load up on the most valuable castle so I will concede it and attempt to dominate the middle values.
538,1,1,3,3,3,14,18,17,20,20,Top heavy is my favorite.
539,0,1,2,2,2,4,23,23,22,21,
540,4,5,6,7,20,25,30,1,1,1,Capture the low value castles
541,7,0,0,0,0,0,0,35,32,26,"The bare minimum to win 28 victory points, assuming I win all of my chosen battles.  This allows me to maximize my troop deployment  to a minimum number of castles.  "
542,10,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,30,30,People are going to overthink it. 1/8/9/10 is enough to win.
543,0,6,7,8,10,17,20,3,25,4,"I'm guessing 8, 10, and 1 will be the least cost effective castles, based on the previous wars, so I focused my troop deployment on the others."
544,0,0,0,0,18,22,26,0,0,34,Stakeout the middle and get the top one. Didn’t waste on other castles.
545,1,1,2,2,17,17,17,4,1,38,Maximize towers to get to 28 points
546,0,0,0,20,0,0,0,0,40,40,23 points to win.  Overload the highest rated castles and sacrifice everything else
547,0,4,6,8,11,14,22,23,12,0,I'll never tell.
548,3,5,6,8,0,12,14,15,17,20,"Scale investment to reward, but then abandon castle 5 and use the extra soldiers to try to beat other warlords scaling investment to reward"
549,0,4,6,9,12,15,18,0,18,18,"Previously I had anticipated 10 to be the central battleground and abandoned it, the past two rounds the central battleground has ended up being 8 instead. I've abandoned contesting 8, focusing on the surrounding high number figures, and tapering off from there. 1 is also abandoned as low reward. "
550,0,0,0,0,0,15,17,0,33,35,
551,0,0,0,0,15,20,2,2,27,34,"Focusing resources where they could be useful, deliberately avoiding a couple of high-value targets to win the war"
552,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,32,31,32,The goal is to get 28 points. Concentrated troops at the least amount of castles to achieve that.
553,1,3,5,10,16,26,20,11,4,4,Why wouldn't you choose this troop deployment?
554,0,2,3,3,16,20,22,26,4,4,
555,0,0,25,0,25,0,25,25,0,0,"Sacrifices must be made!  Castles 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, and 10 are dead to me! Going hyper-aggressive (but not the most aggressive strategy).  Best Case: I win! Worst Case: I am a troll!"
556,0,0,0,0,0,10,15,20,25,30,"Win four of the top five castles, and you win. This particular troop distribution fights harder for the bigger prizes; would win against four of the five top strategies devised last time; and should be able to compete against anyone putting significant effort in winning lower tier castles, as people have been doing."
557,2,3,4,6,10,13,14,19,15,14,Average of prior deployment data with small adjustments.
558,8,9,9,10,0,0,0,30,0,34,"Try to win 1,2,3,4,8,10 to get to 28"
559,0,2,3,1,12,12,12,12,12,34,"Top strategies in round 2 were all-in on 4 specific numbers, particularly 9+10 and a 9-sum pair (4/5, 3/6, 2/7, 1/8). Looking to break that by stealing 10 then getting 3 out of 5-9 range. Loses to top strategies of round 1 (more balanced emphasis on 5-9 range), hopefully the 'meta' doesn't drift back. "
560,2,2,7,10,13,17,8,10,8,23,"Moneyball style. The goal is to buy points, and our goal is 28 points (more than half of 55). I divided 100 soldiers by 28 points and determined that the ""right"" value of a point is about 3.5 soldiers. I then determined the ""right"" value of each castle. I made a list of all the possible castle combinations to get to 28, and did some math to determine the inefficiencies between ""right"" values and ""actual"" values of the castles in prior exercises (for instance, Castle 10 was worth about 33 soldiers, but averaged 11.5 soldiers). Then I picked one combo that did not emphasize the most emphasized castles in the prior exercises (8,7,9). Then I averaged the ""right"" value for that combination against the average value placed on each castle in the previous two exercises, and went with that. I checked it against the averages and winners of the last one and felt comfortable to submit."
561,0,4,0,0,22,22,22,30,0,0,
562,0,1,3,20,3,0,21,24,0,28,"Looked at the past distributions and estimated what it would take to win castles 10, 8, 7, and 4. Saved some leftover men for other random castles. But figured castle 9 wasn't worth it. "
563,0,0,0,0,17,21,0,26,36,0,"I think a lot of people will be fighting for #10 and #1 because 10 is worth the most points and #1 is the tiebreaker if you went 10,9,8,1 or 7,6,5,4,3,2,1. I considered going for 10,9,8, 2 to avoid fighting over the #1 and because I could win even with a tie on #2, and then realized I could avoid #10 as well. In summary, I'm avoiding fighting over what I expect to be hotly contested #10 and #1 in favor of #6 and #5 while maintaining the concentration of my troops by only needing to capture 4 castles to win. As far as specific troop distribution goes, I made sure I had at least three times the castle number and dumped a bunch extra on #9, which I think will receive a heavy designation from anyone pursuing a variant of the 10,9,8,1 strategy. I did not assign any troop numbers that end in 0 or 5, they are too popular."
564,1,3,0,4,15,0,21,16,9,31,"I generated it randomly. I multiplied the value of each castle by a random real number selected from a Poisson distribution with rate=2, rounded down to the nearest integer, then gave any remaining soldiers to castle 10. I generated a few allotments this way, picked one that looked nice, and checked it against the top five from the past two iterations. I had a decent record against past winners so I went for it!"
565,1,0,4,0,3,20,27,6,34,5,"I picked something that would defeat the top 3 in both prior battles.  I added one army in #1 to catch those with zero in #1, for a 9+7+6+5+1=28 win.  I put five in #10 to catch those who put two to four in it.  I think my most-likely wins will be 9+8+7+6, 10+9+7+6, 10+9+7+3, 10+8+7+6, 9+7+6+5+3, 9+7+6+5+1, 8+7+6+5+3.  I will lose to anyone who is heavier in 10+8+5+4+2 or 10+8+5+4+1."
566,1,4,9,7,3,9,7,25,20,15,Heavy on 8s and 9s thinking others would overrate 10.
567,1,2,4,7,19,11,24,17,3,12,I chose it for the win!
568,1,2,6,1,1,18,3,2,33,33,To maximize winnings.
569,1,1,4,12,20,20,20,20,1,1,"I assumed most opponents would go for castle 9 or 10 so I tried to leverage 5-8, with a 12 also likely taking 4.  I added 1's to other castles just in case an opponent deployed a zero on X castle strategy also. "
570,2,0,6,0,2,0,23,36,0,31,I think people are going for 9. Trynna lock down 8 and 10 and hope 7&3 are strong enough.
571,2,2,2,2,2,11,21,31,11,16,"I think a major underlooked part of the strategy is that many people will default to round numbers. Going one over the natural human instinct for round numbers should have a high return all over the board. Additionally, the previous two winning strategies had low numbers on the high-value castles, presumably because competition is fierce up there. But eventually enough people will switch resources away from those castles to make them profitable conquests again. I'm hoping third time's the charm! "
572,0,3,6,8,9,11,12,14,17,20,"Using a base-10 logarithmic scale to determine base troop deployment for each castle (base troop deployment = log(castle#) * 10).  Deduct each base number of troops deployed at each castle from 10, and send those troops to each castle in reverse order.  E.g. spare troops from #1 go to #10, spares from #2 to #9, and so on until spares from #10 go to #1.  I end up not sending any to #1 because log(1) = 0 and log(10) = 1."
573,1,1,3,4,8,13,17,18,27,8,Felt good
574,1,2,2,18,2,18,22,33,1,1,"I expect that there will be even more of a focus on number 10 this time, so I'm going to ignore that one. My plan is to get to 28 without winning either 9 or 10."
575,0,0,8,12,13,13,13,13,14,14,
576,6,6,6,11,6,16,6,6,16,21,No round numbers.  Try to take castles that would be overlooked by others.
577,0,1,3,5,7,10,13,16,20,25,Based on a fibonacci series with rounding to the nearest integer.
578,1,1,2,4,10,17,27,32,3,3,
579,1,1,2,3,10,5,15,32,4,27,I think the key may be to pick up some free points from the lower castles.
580,0,0,0,0,0,0,25,25,25,25,"Instead of spreading out my troops, I wanted to backend my troops toward the castles with higher amount of individual points."
581,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,I just distributed troops proportionally to the value of the castle.  I very strongly doubt that this will be successful.
582,5,6,7,8,9,11,12,13,14,15,"I attempted to give more weight to the more valuable castles, but not neglect the less valuable that could give me the upper-hand."
583,1,3,6,8,13,14,15,16,1,23,This feels like what Nate Silver's mom would do.
584,3,2,5,9,11,15,22,20,3,10,Trying to beat the last two averages from the riddles before
585,4,5,7,9,11,14,17,20,0,13,surrender castle 9 completely -- exceed the average of BOTH original and May average per castle strategies for every other battle.
586,0,0,0,0,21,21,0,29,29,0,"Let me try this again because I did my math wrong.  Sacrifices must be made! Castles 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10 are dead to me."
587,0,0,0,0,0,20,23,26,30,1,"Grasp barely enough castles to win, plus one in 10 as a counter strategy against a mirror match."
588,0,0,0,5,7,8,13,15,20,32,"The smallest 3 castles combine for only 6 points, so they're not worth deploying to, especially since that increases the available troops you can commit to the more valuable targets."
589,0,0,0,8,11,14,17,20,17,13,beat the average for both original Feb. and May soldiers per castle for all of the most valuable castles - punt on the low point battles.
590,6,6,6,20,20,20,5,5,6,6,"A lengthy period of psychoanalysis — I pictured some folks committing a ton of troops to collecting 7 to 10, and others committing almost none elsewhere... 5 or 6 was chosen as a number that would defeat those folks that just said 1, 2, or 3."
591,1,1,10,12,9,18,2,2,20,25,
592,1,1,1,1,19,19,2,20,34,2,I do whatever your mom tells me to do.
593,3,3,6,13,6,18,9,11,14,17,"I generated some random troop deployments, had them all battle each other, and this was the best one."
594,1,1,1,1,5,17,17,17,20,20,
595,3,3,1,2,3,6,5,20,12,45,Made a non linear shot for two big numbers and hope to get a couple of lower castles.
596,1,1,1,9,16,21,22,23,5,1,"I am deploying to win points, not the most castles. If most are deploying troops to the larger point totals, they can win those in a blowout, while I put together a strong contingent of mid tier wins to get to 28 total points. However, I avoid conceding any castle outright."
597,0,3,5,6,15,5,6,10,24,26,Basically a half-baked revision of the winner of the last time (trying not to duplicate exactly or respond too directly)
598,1,2,2,5,7,20,20,20,20,3,
599,0,1,1,16,21,2,2,3,32,22,"I created a giant spreadsheet that I filled with placements from the previous rounds (with winners on the list twice because they rock). Then I built formulas to calculate my win percentage against them and played with my placements. After lots of testing, I chose a modified Vince Vatter (Round 2 champ who) that performed slightly worse that his Round 2 victory in my experiments. I did this because I figured people would note that leaving 0 or 1 soldier in a castle was a bad move and would start leaving 2 or 3. Basically, I did some math then took a guess as to how the masses would behave. My goal is over 80% victory!"
600,1,4,0,0,5,6,10,24,23,27,"I didn't put much into the lower troops, but went bigger into high troops. Tried to eek out a win at Castle 1, but other than that I went low."
601,1,1,1,1,2,5,11,24,26,28,"Take the highest values, easy points for people abandoning low values"
602,1,2,11,2,14,16,17,31,3,3,Go for the middle
603,2,2,2,2,2,15,18,21,34,2,"Assume no-one leaves any with 0, so 2 beats the 1s. Assume most people aim for 10. Load up on next highest in descending priority."
604,0,2,0,11,11,0,25,24,27,0,You only have to win by a little.
605,2,6,2,12,2,18,2,28,10,18,"A very non-sophisticated strategy based on simple logic and even numbers. With 55 points up for grabs, I need 28 to win. 10+8+6+4 is my ideal path to 28 in this strategy. So I put lots of troops into those castles. I picked the exact numbers based on multiplying the averages from previous versions of this by ~1.5. I spent what was left by dropping a couple “just in case” 2s in castles 1, 3, 5 and 7, then the remaining 10 in castle 9."
606,0,0,0,15,15,20,25,25,0,0,Focus more troops on enough points to get more than half of points.
607,0,3,3,5,10,21,21,21,10,6,"Castle 1 is basically worthless, and as for the rest I just have to beat the most people, not the best people. So I'm assuming most people who do this didn't read and react the previous results and will therefore lose to a similar strategy as before just with minor tweaks."
608,3,3,3,3,3,17,17,17,17,17,
609,3,3,3,4,4,5,5,5,34,34,Slanging it
610,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,33,33,33,"Try to ensure victory at the top 3 values, which are greater than the sum of the rest"
611,1,1,1,1,0,0,24,24,24,24,
612,3,3,9,2,3,14,21,5,17,23,"There are 7 strategies I'm trying to beat, 4 historical and 3 forecasts. The 4 historical strategies are the February Average, the May rematch Average, and the two champions Vince Vatter and Cyrus Hettle. The 3 forecasts are what I call the ""Forecast Average,"" and Copycat 1 and Copycat 2. The Forecast Average is what I expect the average castle distribution to be based on the last two battles: 3,4,8,9,11,11,14,15,12,13. The Copycats are players who are trying to synthesize the strategies of the last two winners. Copycat 1 focuses troops on castles 5, 8 and 9 (distribution: 1,3,5,8,12,2,3,31,33,2). Copycat 2 focuses troops on castles 4, 6, 7, and 10 (distribution: 2,2,6,12,2,17,22,2,3,32).

My distribution scores very well against the 3 historical averages, which I hope will represent the majority of players and get my win rate above 50%. And hopefully it narrowly defeats most of the elite players who are trying to copy previous champions, putting me in the upper echelon."
613,0,4,8,10,15,5,30,23,5,0,Putting more troops into the medium level castles
614,3,6,0,14,0,22,25,30,0,0,"I figured you need 28 points to win and winning 1-7 will get you there exactly. That means you can reallocate all your points from 8-10 to 1-7 and stand a good chance of winning. Other people might do that too though, so I did some other stuff on a whim to mix it up."
615,0,0,8,4,4,21,16,22,4,21,Rd2 winners saw 2 trends v. 1: Entrants mimicked 1 and therefore 2 winners were differented from 1 winners in placement and throw-away towers were defended with 3-4 v. 1-2 solders to win. I picked a strategy that is different from 1-2 and increases throw-away defense slightly.
616,2,5,8,5,6,16,15,18,8,17,Rd2 winners saw 2 trends v. 1: Entrants mimicked 1 and therefore 2 winners were differented from 1 winners in placement and throw-away towers were defended with 3-4 v. 1-2 solders to win. I picked a strategy that is different from 1-2 and increases throw-away defense slightly.
617,1,1,1,13,16,19,22,25,1,1,4-5-6-7-8 is enough to win.
618,4,4,4,14,14,14,4,4,34,4,
619,2,1,10,12,14,3,13,4,37,4,"Defensive strategy, hope opponent went all in on 9. "
620,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,19,
621,0,0,1,10,11,12,1,1,32,32,"Fight for the top two, plus the center"
622,2,2,2,16,2,2,18,23,30,3,"Trying to win the game 28-27 every time. compete for 9+8+7+4, if we both compete for the same one have just enough to maybe split a weird one (10,6,5)"
623,4,6,11,4,14,6,21,4,24,6,"Decided to fight heavily for all of the odd numbered castles - competition for 10 is likely to be high based on the last two rounds having 10 be somewhat low! I might pick up some easy points on the even numbers. Rather than trying to come up with a nice pattern, do the unexpected and be odd!"
624,2,2,2,2,2,12,2,42,12,22,
625,1,2,3,4,5,11,16,21,26,11,"Always have at least 1 soldier to pick up free wins. Try to be one above round numbers on the more valuable castles. Assume 10 will be the most contested, so cap out on number 9. Beats a strategy of putting 20 each in the last 5, as well as 25 each in the last 4, or 10 in each."
626,1,1,1,1,1,15,20,20,20,20,
627,1,1,12,6,6,23,2,2,25,22,Prior data wanted to win high value targets while getting to 28 in most efficient way possible while still covering possible deficiencies or ignored castles.
628,2,3,4,6,7,11,12,14,16,25,Trying to adhere to the 2 troops for 1 vp but with some skew to capture 10 based on last time around.
629,0,0,0,3,10,21,29,22,11,4,Created a slightly skewed normal distribution centered on 7 then mapped 100 soldiers across that distribution!
630,1,3,7,9,12,8,24,30,3,3,
631,1,2,3,4,10,15,15,15,4,31,Last time it seems the top teams underrepresented castles 5-8. Zig when they zag and whatnot.
632,0,0,7,8,11,0,0,23,25,26,
633,4,7,10,14,17,22,26,0,0,0,Distributed proportionally-ish on the buckets (hopefully) most likely to get to 28
634,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,30,35,"28 points is a win, so that's all I'm going for. The Castle 1 victory is essential!"
635,2,2,2,2,2,22,22,22,22,2,Give me all those 1 troop castles. They are mine.
636,3,5,11,18,2,19,19,17,2,4,Already submitted but I think I typoed to have my totals over 100?
637,3,4,4,4,4,25,25,26,2,3,
638,2,2,2,11,2,21,1,28,1,30,"Step 1: Secure enough points (28) for the win with as few castles as necessary (4) to allow for largest deployments. Attempt mainly even numbered castles  - partially a gut feeling, partially so that a lost castle can be compensated with a few small ones more easily.
Step 2: Prevent a loss against an archenemy with a normal distribution of forces (10 at each castle) by using at least 11 at my primary targets.
Step 3: Place at least 1 in each lesser-targeted castle in case my archenemy doesn't attack it, but put 2 in the lower ones to increase the chance of scooping up extra points to offset a potential loss of a large castle.
Step 4: Bask in glory as I defeat a majority of the would-be warlords in Riddler Nation!
"
639,0,1,1,1,17,20,2,26,29,3,
640,1,1,6,10,12,12,15,16,13,14,Assumed a trend based on the first two events.  Added one solider more than the anticipated trend value to castles 4 through 10.  Put the minimum on Castles 1 and 2 and the remainder on Castle 3.  Crosses fingers.
641,0,0,5,15,5,10,20,20,25,0,I abandoned the first and last castles as not worth fighting over and focused on castles a little before and after the center that other teams might neglect.
642,1,1,1,1,1,17,18,19,20,21,"Token support on the least valuable castles.  Divide the remaining forces on the most valuable 5 castles, weighting the distribution of soldiers to the more valuable castles. "
643,1,3,5,7,9,10,12,14,16,23,"Trying to maintain approximately the same troop-to-score ratio for each castle (1.8 soldiers per point, rounded down), then threw my 5 left over soldiers into castle 10 to try and win the highest scoring castle."
644,1,6,6,15,6,6,6,6,42,6,"This strategy focuses on disrupting any focused deployment strategies that players may build based on previous winners. In previous editions of this game, 6 troops win most battles for most castles. So I should win anytime someone chooses to send a small number of troops. I'm also virtually guaranteed to win castles 4 and 9 due to my excessive forces in both locations. The result is that I will steal a castle from all players focused on either high value, or midrange castles, preventing them from winning one of the castles core to their strategy, while taking all of the castles they chose to ignore."
645,1,2,2,5,11,13,16,17,17,16,"I compiled the list of winning strategies from the first and second bouts, plus the median from the first, the mean from the first (weighted double), and the mean from the second (weighted triple). Then I picked an allotment that would win against around half of these for Castles 5, 6, and 7, and more than half for 8, 9, and 10. Then I fudged around with 7, 8, 9, and 10 so they formed a nice symmetric 16/17/17/16, and put a token remainder on Castles 1-4.  "
646,1,1,2,5,8,11,14,17,19,22,Diminishing returns
647,5,6,10,3,4,5,4,54,4,5,"Looked at past battles and picked the inflection point of diminishing returns, had like 50 troops left and threw them all at castle 8 which was highest point value with widest distribution"
648,0,0,0,0,0,100,0,0,0,0,All of the troops at the first castle higher than 5
649,2,3,4,20,23,13,4,7,0,24,Counter Strategy
650,2,4,7,10,12,2,27,28,4,4,"Slightly higher deployment from last time’s in castles 9-10. If people saw the last one and went for 3 soldiers to win it I win, if they didn't see it and behaved the same (average 2-3 soldiers) I still win"
651,1,2,2,11,11,11,8,18,18,18,Concentrate on the higher values with some randomness mixed in.
652,4,5,6,5,12,23,14,15,14,2,mystery
653,2,2,2,2,2,2,10,25,50,3,"I gave at least two to all the castles so I can try to bank some smaller points and I think if my opponent tries the same he'll probably only throw one out there. Then, I targeted Castle 9 with Castle 8 as a back up, in case they throw all of their points at 10. Then I stagger the rest I guess"
654,1,7,1,1,14,18,21,33,2,2,"Similar strategy to previous winners, adjusted numbers slightly for some variation"
655,2,3,5,6,7,15,14,15,16,17,"Tried to win castle 6, plus 2 of 7, 8, 9, 10 assuming that most contestants will go for 2 of 7, 8, 9, 10.  Then scatter enough on 1-5 to pick up some points there."
656,1,2,2,2,11,2,21,26,31,2,"Tried to win 7/8/9 in most cases, then need only 4 pts left for victory.  2 gaps help defeat all gap fillers of 1."
657,1,1,10,10,15,25,5,5,1,27,
658,2,5,5,9,11,10,26,28,2,2,"I looked at the first battle you had, added up the total on each castle for the top entries, then divided proportionally.  There seemed to be something vaguely bell-curve-derivative about the winners."
659,1,1,2,9,11,13,16,18,15,14,+1 to average May battles less on castles 1-3
660,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,Figured the most efficient distribution is 0.55 points per man.  Applied the ideal to to each castle and rounded to the closest whole number.
661,2,2,2,2,2,14,24,27,23,2,My plan would be to take 54.5% of the points possible and put 88% of them toward that in order to help secure as many points as possible in the 6-9 range. Then have 2 soldiers at each other castle to hopefully catch people who don't value the lower valued castles or assume they are going to lose Castle 10 and don't put anyone there.
662,0,0,0,0,0,0,26,32,42,0,"I only need to win 3 castles, assuming people focus on 10, I decided to ignore it an focus on the next three and then power creep 9 and 8 in case people had the same idea as I did."
663,1,4,1,1,1,1,23,1,28,39,"This is my second submisssion, I wanted to try a completely different strategy.  Here I aim to win 10, 9, 7 and 2 against many opponents, when that fails, I hope to win enough from the rest as I expect many entries to have several 0's and 1's."
664,1,4,6,7,12,3,27,33,3,4,"I need 28 points to win. Following the logic from previous iterations, I'm focusing on trying to secure 15 points from castles 7 and 8 while hoping to steal the remaining 13 points from winning 1 or 2 from castles 2-5 and 1 of castles 9 and 10."
665,0,0,3,7,10,14,18,21,18,9,"Zeroed out castle 1 and 2 since 3 points is small potatoes. Created a constraint that castle 3-10 had to be at least (Round One Median +1). Created 12 opponents, 5 winners from round 1, 5 winners from round 2, 2 opponents of my making. Used excel solver to maximize number of wins out of 12. Essentially creating an optimal solution to beat all 10 named winners with the additional requirement that each castle above castle 2 should be above the median and therefore more than 50% likely to be captured by me in any given game"
666,2,2,7,10,16,22,29,4,4,4,win everything 7 and below and beat people sending 3 or less to high numbers.
667,0,0,8,11,0,22,28,31,0,0,Strongly attacked with the most likely castles to reach 28.
668,0,0,0,0,23,24,25,0,28,0,
669,0,0,9,11,21,18,18,0,0,23,Just kinda throwing some troops like the US Govt throws money at the army
670,0,5,5,3,23,23,27,11,1,2,"Decided to weigh 7-5 the heaviest, as they are accountable for a good chunk of points. Didn't want to lose 9 or 10 if they were abandoned, so I put a few there (but mostly empty). Then I concentrated some on 8 (expecting that it would be defended less than 5-7 but not as minimally as 9-10). The lower values were kind of chosen randomly."
671,1,1,2,4,6,9,13,17,21,26,"it's a quadratic distribution of soldiers, and I like smooth curves"
672,0,0,17,0,0,0,29,23,2,29,"All-in on 3,7,8,10"
673,0,0,2,15,11,6,5,3,27,31,"I tried to place heavier in the 9 and 10 spot to guarantee more points and let the 1 and 2 spots go, as they provide minimal points.  I also sacrificed a chicken to Jobu."
674,0,8,9,10,13,15,20,0,25,0,"When you consider how many soldiers you spend for each point gained, from the previous data eight is the worst value, so should not be contested and ten is the best value, so I think many people will be trying to prioritize castle ten, so I just left it out. Victory doesn't come by contesting all the points but by being able to secure more than half of them. basically 49% of the points don't matter at all."
675,1,1,1,1,23,15,3,26,3,26,"Past winning strategies seemed to either focus on 7&8 or 9&10, so I've focused on the 10 and 8 to try to win the higher of each pair. Also previously neglected was 6, so I went for that as well, and went for the jugular on 5 since that pushes the total over the halfway mark points-wise. The others I put minimal investment in, though with 3 soldiers to the higher-end castles since 2's are common scouting forces."
676,1,3,3,3,5,5,10,10,30,30,I distributed them based on how important the castle was.
677,3,6,6,9,11,2,27,31,2,3,Trying to bet 1 more than what I believe the majority of people will do based on your historical data.
678,30,30,30,0,0,0,0,0,0,10,"As I expect many to choose low troop numbers for the top castles, I deploy many soldiers there in order to hopefully take those three. After that, only one point is needed to win, so I chose to attack castle 10 in hopes that it is the least guarded. This appears to be a reasonable strategy based on the previous distribution."
679,2,4,7,15,18,21,0,2,0,31,"I dunno, I tried to win all the battles I picked. My strategy does well against last time's winners and beats the average distribution, I guess."
680,0,0,12,1,2,23,3,3,33,23,"I used k-medoid clustering to find median strategies that represent the most common strategies, then found an allocation of soldiers that beat the 8 most common strategies. I then used that as an initial input to Robbie Ostrow's simulated annealing code from Part 2, which spat out the above."
681,0,0,12,0,0,26,0,0,29,33,Choose just a few castles and maximize the chances of winning those.
682,1,3,4,9,6,18,8,18,6,27,"Base: Assign soldier number equal to castle number using 55. Do it again using castle #-1 using the other 45. Adjust: disfavor odd # castles trying for wins in #4, 6, 8, and 10."
683,1,2,2,2,2,21,22,23,25,0,
684,2,4,7,7,8,15,18,18,20,1,They can all go after the top castle all they want. I am giving them the top castle to strengthen my middle.
685,3,4,5,6,10,10,11,13,16,22,"I wanted to use just enough troops on the earlier castles to win them , and wanted to win 9 and 10."
686,5,0,7,7,7,21,3,24,2,24,"This strategy wins at least 24 points against an average opponent, and has the opportunity to take at least 4 points from castles that must be left largely unguarded. If an opponent takes 6, 8, or 10, then they likely used too many troops to adequately cover the mid-tier castles."
687,5,0,7,7,7,21,3,24,2,24,"This strategy wins at least 24 points against an average opponent, and has the opportunity to take at least 4 points from castles that must be left largely unguarded. If an opponent takes 6, 8, or 10, then they likely used too many troops to adequately cover the mid-tier castles."
688,1,3,6,7,9,10,13,15,17,19,"If F is a fraction of the troops, 1F+2F+...+9F+10F should equal 100. F is 100/55, or 1.81818...As there are no fractional people, I wanted to allocate the closest whole-number equivalents to 1F, 2F, etc. to the various castles, to minimize my ‘shortfall fraction’. So because some castles have an extra fractional person, the castles I chose to have a ‘shortfall’ were 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6."
689,0,0,0,3,3,18,18,18,18,22,
690,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,18,28,"The golden ratio is a beautiful thing. It is everywhere in math, so why shouldn't it solve this problem too?"
691,0,0,0,10,14,14,0,24,20,18,"Assume strategies converge to a Poisson distribution around the lastest averages, and optimise."
692,1,1,1,1,1,2,31,31,31,0,"all out to capture 7,8,9 and pick up any 0s elsewhere"
693,4,5,3,1,6,25,36,2,9,9,
694,2,9,2,2,1,12,21,16,19,16,trying to divide in a way to get at-least half victory points based on the distribution that might be possible based on the previous two distributions.
695,3,1,1,1,2,2,2,22,34,32,Seems like it'll do the trick often enough. Not even gonna worry about the meta.
696,2,2,3,3,5,11,16,16,21,21,I came. I saw. I conquered. I used Google Translations to say something cool in Latin.
697,1,2,5,13,17,0,26,0,36,0,"I need 28 VPs. So I aimed for an unusual combination of getting them. As long as I get castles 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9, I have my 28 points and have no need to get any others. I will lose only to people who outbid me on one of these five, but those who don't bid 0 on any, or even multiple, castles, will have fewer troops to deploy on those five, so my chances are reasonably good. I expect to lose to those who max out on castles 9 and 10 but to win against a good percentage of other contestants.

I made a late change to go for 3+ points from 1, 2 and 3 combined"
698,5,5,8,8,10,17,20,23,2,2,Winning with the middle picks (maybe) didn't check the last results
699,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,2V-1.  Assets (troops) distributed in proportion to cattle point values.
700,5,6,6,6,11,5,5,6,25,25,"Performs well against round 2, wins more often than not against round 1..."
701,2,3,4,5,5,15,15,25,25,1,I’m feeling lucky.
702,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,Based on value of castles.
703,2,2,7,17,22,22,13,4,4,7,I am inevitable.
704,4,5,8,10,7,13,10,14,17,12,Mixed strategy
705,1,1,2,2,2,10,10,20,50,2,Spread troops to high point value locations but saved on troops sacrificing the highest.
706,2,4,6,8,10,10,12,14,16,18,
707,1,2,4,8,12,16,21,31,2,3,Peak at 80 and decline downwards. Don't sacrifice any entirely.
708,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,14,15,15,
709,9,1,1,1,1,1,1,25,30,30,"55 points possible, so 28 wins. I wanted to defend the fewest amount of castles. Also, I made sure to at least attempt a defense of each castle. "
710,5,8,8,10,17,22,27,1,1,1,"I am assuming the opposing warlord will wager a lot on capturing the high-value targets, and as such am going as close to throwing them as I can (Leaving 1 to attack just in case he doesn't go for them at all.

Instead, I have focused on the lower value targets, hoping that the opponent will focus on the other end.

In this manner, the true key battleground will be Castle 7. If we assume that I win castles 1-6, I will have 21 points against the 27 of 8-10. Therefore, castle 7 becomes critical and if I can win that, victory is almost certain. Additional rear-guarding goes to 6 and 5 to be safe, but I suspect that minor forces can take castles 1-4, leaving most forces to hold for 5-7, and only cursory forces watching for a sneak on castles 8-10."
711,1,1,1,1,1,19,19,19,19,19,I am an Aquarius.
712,2,2,4,4,16,16,21,31,2,2,No particular strategy
713,0,0,0,0,0,10,10,15,25,40,
714,4,0,7,0,0,11,0,0,38,40,"Focus on getting required 28 points to win by targeting top tiers to make up bulk of points, and a few lower tier castles to add in just enough points."
715,1,3,5,7,11,11,13,15,16,18,Allocated the same proportion of troops equal to the proportion of total points the castle represents.
716,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,"I split all my troops up equally based on each castles point value. Since there were a total of 55 points between all ten castles and I was given 100 troops there was no way to split up 100/55 straight up. Instead, I went with the equation 2(points)-1= soldiers. This leads to having exactly 100 troops distributed among the ten castles while assigning troops equally among each point value. "
717,4,6,8,12,17,22,31,0,0,0,"Focus on the front 7, which adds up to 28, which gives you one more than your opponent, who takes 7,8,9 (total 27)"
718,1,1,1,6,20,20,20,25,3,3,"Looking at last time, if I wanted to beat that I would go for a bit more on the higher values and drop the lower ones. This should beat that by having a few more on 5-8, while also picking up 9 and 10 if people dump that, and beating 0s on 1-3"
719,1,6,1,1,41,7,7,34,1,1,"Starting with the goal of reaching 28 points, I went with a balance of offense and defense.  The distribution I was shooting for was winning 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8.  Leaving 9 and 10 pretty much open would let my opponent waste much of their capitol on those, leaving only 8 and 5 as 'battles,' but ones in which my opponent would have less to spend.  Seeing the distributions of the previous 2 rounds, 6 and 7 seemed pretty safe, so I spent my soldiers on 5 and 8, leaving token 1's to leverage against random strategies with zeros.  "
720,0,7,0,14,0,21,25,0,33,0,"I considered strategies which are most efficient in usage of troops (ie. trying to get exactly 28 points) which would allow for ~3.57 troops per point value of the castle. Then I considered rounding error on the troops deployed - if others are also using 28-point strategies, then the best of them would be those that used the castles with small negative rounding errors. (ie. Castle 2 asks for ~7.14 troops but would be satisfied with 7). So I pick castle 2,4,6,7,&9 which leaves me with one leftover troop - I think Castle 9 might be the most competitive among 28-point strategies, so I drop the extra troop there."
721,2,8,8,8,8,30,2,30,2,2,Goal was to get 28 points. Abandon high value targets and hope that they draw many troops.
722,1,1,5,1,20,20,1,25,25,1,"There's no way to win without taking at least 4 numbers with an average of 7 (need to sum up to 28 to win).  I figure there will probably be a psychological bias towards playing a lot of troops on 10, and a psychological bias towards abandoning numbers not getting played for in strategies.  The 1s are to pick up those abandoned numbers easily, and I figure plays of 20 on mid tier numbers have a high likelihood of winning."
723,10,10,10,10,10,25,25,0,0,0,"There are 55 points up for grabs. To win, I would need 28 or more. I disregard castles 8, 9, and 10. That loses me 27 points. However, I deploy the remaining soldiers in the following manner -

1. Castles 6 and 7 get 25 soldiers each. Assuming that the opponent has committed most soldiers to castles 8, 9, and 10, I should be able to gain these two castles.

2.  For the remaining castles, I will assign 10 soldiers each.

The hope is that the opponent over-commits on the higher value castles while undervaluing the remaining castles. By flipping that thinking on its head, I hope to undermine the opponent's strategy."
724,3,3,3,7,7,6,6,15,30,20,My goal was to fight for every castle. A sizable investment in castle “9” and “10” was meant to punish any player who got too cheeky while also remaining competitive in the middle values. No castles for free to the opponent.
725,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,19,Made it up
726,2,5,5,2,6,11,30,29,6,4,"Not quite randomly, I looked at a line graph of the averages of top scorers from the first and second iteration.  Then I imagined the future iterations as something of a jump-rope moving.  While over-caffeinated, this was the decided plan of attack: 
Let x1 and x2 be the vectors of troops deployed per castle.
Let y3 = 1/2(x2-x1)
Because x2+y3 gives negative components for castles 9 and 10, we assume that there is a ""bounce-back"" from 0.  
Now we need to re-assign the 31.8 troops over castles 1 through 8.  So we assume ""exponential decay"" as a function of distance from castle 9 (alpha=0.8, chosen arbitrarily).
Magic?"
727,0,14,0,0,0,0,0,28,29,29,"To get more than half of the 55 total points, it requires 10+9+8+1 (28/55), thus, we should focus our soldiers most at the top three castles. The last point can come from any castle. Since it is likely that castle 7–being worth 7 points—will be paid attention to more than the castles lower than it, we should let that one fall. Since we only need one more point after assuming a win at 8-10, we should go for the lower castles. I believe, however, that many people will go after 1 strategically to get one last point, so I choose to go after 2, which tho it has more point value, might get raided less by those who are attempting a similar strategy to mjne."
728,0,0,0,5,6,7,8,22,25,27,
729,0,0,8,10,12,14,17,19,20,0,"I guessed that an distribution proportionate to point values will rarely win the 10 and will waste trips on the low-value castles, so I dropped the 10 and the bottom too and then loosely distributed them proportionally from there fight estimating as I wrote on some construction paper with a crayon."
730,17,11,11,11,12,15,20,1,1,1,"The warlord can win with 1-7.  Rather than targeting the high-point castles, target the low-point castles.  In case our competitor tries the same strategy, we left one troop on each of 8-10, and loaded up on 1."
731,0,7,0,0,0,0,25,0,32,36,
732,1,1,3,5,7,13,16,22,15,17,Value weight plus noise
733,7,13,7,13,4,16,4,16,2,18,"I was trying to guess the 100,000,000 number and this answer keeps coming up"
734,6,7,9,12,16,21,26,1,1,1,"Total of 55 VP to be won, and a player who wins the top 4 castles wins the game. Some will push really hard to win the top 4. Others will realize this and try to scoop up the low VP castles cheaply while still competing for some of the top 4. Honestly that's pretty much what I'm doing too, but rather than competing for the top 4, the idea is to scoop up the bottom 7, while tossing a bone to the top 3 castles to hopefully outdo anyone who is using a similar bottom-up strategy.

The idea is that, while most people will invest a lot into the top castles (because they are valuable and because they expect others to do the same), many will not invest much into the bottom castles. This makes them (hopefully) cheap to obtain, and allows a pretty hefty force to go to castle 7 to (again, hopefully) outdo those who want castle 7, but who value it 4th most."
735,1,2,2,0,0,4,6,8,34,43,win 10/9 and two average others
736,5,5,20,5,5,20,5,5,10,20,"Not sure, just playing! "
737,0,0,4,15,18,6,4,2,28,23,Random ass guessing
738,2,5,5,17,19,7,7,6,18,14,"Played around with numbers in excel until I found a combo that would beat all of the top 5 entries from both of the past 2 contests, as well as the mean numbers from both"
739,0,0,1,18,2,24,3,22,3,27,"go for 4 castles that add up to just over half of points: 10, 8, 6 & 4. put some troops for most other castles in case i get wiped out on my targets by someone who sends few or no troops elsewhere. go all in on castles 6 & 4 (4 & 4.5 troops per point) with less investment in castles 10 & 8 (2.7 & 2.5 troops per point). send 0.33-0.43 troops per point to castles 3, 5, 7 & 9. this troop alignment happens to beat the top 10 previous finishers (5 from first round & 5 from second round). the main weakness of this strategy is if someone sends a ton of troops to castles 10, 9, 8 & 7 however not many players seem to take that strategy. the other weakness is an odd-numbered-focused strategy where the opponent sends a ton of troops to castle 10 or 8, plus a moderate number of troops to castles 9, 7, 5, 3, 2 and/or 1."
740,11,11,11,13,14,20,20,0,0,0,"I think people will underinvest in low value castles, and invest more on high value castles than the middle range ones.  So my hope is to win one through five relatively cheaply, while having a decent chance of winning 6 and 7. "
741,3,3,3,3,3,11,24,35,8,7,Last time but winning those.
742,3,4,7,9,13,17,18,21,4,4,"Assumed trend toward more rational actors with castle troop distribution trending toward implicit value, anticipating some over-correction on most favorably imbalanced "
743,1,1,1,5,5,5,5,30,30,17,
744,1,2,6,8,12,14,16,19,11,11,
745,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,32,34,"My plan hinges on capturing the most valuable castles, 8, 9 and 10, as well as capitalizing - hopefully - on a perceived deficiency in the lowest value castle, 1. The total value of 55 divided by 2 gets 27.5, so the magic number is 28. 10, 9, and 8 would get me to 27 already, so capturing 1 alone would put me over the top. If I lose any battle I've committed to, I lose. If I tie any battle I've committed to, I lose (other than 1, in which I'd tie). Hopefully all works out."
746,1,1,2,8,15,20,3,4,23,23,
747,4,1,6,1,1,20,0,32,0,35,"Goal is to take castles 1, 3, 6, 8, 10 for a winning 28 points. Single points in castles 2, 4, 5 are to tie with other people who put a single point in their castles or win against people who put 0 points in there castles. On a weighted percentage any opponent who puts more into castle 10, 8 or 6 is drastically overvaluing these castles (since you need half the points to tie any castle with more than double its weighted percentage is overvalued) and may beat me but will not be beating the majority of other opponents. I slightly undervalued castle 10 and castle 6, because I anticipate heavy investment in castles 8 and 9.  Concerns are a skew to castle 3 in response to round 2 and that naive strategies (say 0 0 0 0 0 0 20 20 20 40) that are more top heavy are prevalent enough in the 538 reader base that I cannot win castles 10, 8, 6, and 3 consistently. Interestingly enough an even distribution of (10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10) beats my distribution and the top 5 distributions from round 2. I assume however that most of the 538 reader base will not submit such a simplistic submission. My distribution beats the top 5 from round 2, but loses to the 3 of the top 5 from round 1.  I do not anticipate to win round 3, but am anticipating many readers will play similar strategies. "
748,1,0,2,2,11,12,24,24,0,24,
749,2,3,4,6,9,14,21,17,12,12,Focus on the valuable middle to high castles
750,2,2,2,3,3,11,16,31,3,27,this did ok when tried with a smaller group of students
751,0,10,0,10,5,10,15,20,10,20,My 11 year son is pretty sure this will win.
752,5,7,10,12,15,17,31,1,1,1,"I wanted to guarantee victory on the first 7 castles. Briefly looking at past data, I estimated 28 victory points would be the number to aim for."
753,2,3,4,6,10,18,24,1,31,1,I wanted to obviously weigh the greater castles with more troops. I didn’t want to dump a lot of resources into 10 because people would target it. I also chose 9 instead of 8 due to previous results (in case that influenced other people’s picks)
754,3,5,7,10,15,22,28,2,4,4,"Mostly abandon the top tier castles and focus my forces on the lower values. However, send what are hopefully slightly larger scouting parties to the high value targets. "
755,4,1,15,0,0,0,0,0,40,40,"Only need 22.5 points to win. Figured 40 would win most of the time at 9 & 10, so I only need 3.5"
756,0,4,6,8,22,20,12,12,9,7,"pure guess, did not look at previous games"
757,1,1,6,10,20,25,20,15,1,1,"Center around middle, most point per troop (don't want to waste at any point). At least one in each-points if ever left empty"
758,1,1,1,11,11,6,6,6,22,35,"A hybrid strategy that attempts to guarantee Castle 10, and secure the remaining 18 points from poorly-guarded castles.  Similar to last year's winners, but weakens the investment in Castle 9 in exchange for a moderate investment into Castles 6, 7, and 8 designed to reliably overwhelm token forces.  This strategy edges out the points-per-solider distribution and the uniform distribution, as well as last game's 4-5-9-10 meta."
759,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,41,31,24,Magic
760,0,0,0,2,4,13,27,32,18,4,"I am modifying a model of a weighted bell curve, giving least priority to castles that have the least effective in point value, but also avoiding major battles for the top castles, which are relatively equivalent in value.  Also trying to beat people who tend to round off or beat people who round, though that might be overthinking it."
761,2,5,7,20,21,8,13,20,2,2,Optimized against those who optimized against the best strategies from last time. It ended up looking like the strategies of the first time the riddler was posted.
762,1,2,3,4,5,5,23,21,19,17,Random guessing.
763,0,1,10,19,2,22,2,4,20,20,"counters some and breaks even with most of the previous top 5s, and counters the counter-strategy by avoiding the hotter zones."
764,2,3,4,5,9,9,11,19,19,19,Fibbinochi sequence
765,1,5,5,5,9,16,13,17,21,8,"I went with my gut, I also glanced at the data of the past two matches"
766,0,5,0,0,0,0,0,35,30,30,"There is 55 points total. 28 is what you need to win. So win 10,9,8 and 2. Focus on the minimum amount of effort to win. Win by a little or a lot, a win is a win."
767,1,3,4,13,15,18,1,20,22,3,"Go hard on 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9."
768,0,0,0,2,12,16,0,33,34,3,"Trying to win 9, 8, 6, and 5, and hoping I can steal some of the others."
769,0,0,1,16,21,2,25,3,29,3,
770,1,1,1,1,1,1,40,26,15,13,inverse of the 7 down strat
771,2,2,2,8,0,19,26,41,0,0,Avoid wasted troops at high value targets and low v; win on aggregate over sim.
772,0,0,0,3,5,23,16,13,17,23,"Inverted bell curve for the top castles, leaving ineffective castles empty."
773,0,0,0,5,9,14,21,21,30,0,Ill sacrifice the extremes and try to take the bulk of the points in the middle
774,3,6,7,1,2,22,22,2,2,33,"-Always choose numbers of men above multiples of 5. 
-Shift focus away from 4 and 5, where large numbers were sent the previous two times
-go back to focusing on 1, 2, and 3. 
-Finally, move focus away from castle 9 to 10."
775,2,2,2,3,2,2,2,22,28,35,I'm honestly really tired so email me if I win (I doubt it)
776,0,0,0,1,17,17,1,21,10,33,
777,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,35,30,30,"28 is a win, so concentrate where you need to win, and win!"
778,2,3,2,2,3,8,22,22,15,21,
779,1,1,1,1,11,11,1,21,51,1,"I assumed 10, being the most valuable, would be the most likely to see the bulk of enemy troops, by leaving only 1 soldier, I can still claim victory if they ignore it, but lose little to an attack. (Same theory for 1-4 and 7). Since 28 points are needed for victory, and I'm assuming a 10 point loss, the bulk of my troops are stationed at castle 9. With significant forces at 5, 6 and 8. If i can claim these four, i have victory. If i fail on some of these, the single soldiers in other forts hopefully claim unopposed victory."
780,0,0,4,6,0,16,16,18,35,5,
781,1,2,2,3,17,18,19,3,4,31,Because it's good. Done.
782,2,3,8,10,14,7,6,5,21,24,If I don't know what I'm doing than certainly no one else will
783,11,0,2,11,2,14,5,16,3,36,"-Try to lock up 10
-While everyone else is going for 28, go for 29. It guarantees you a couple towers you want, and hopefully if they went all in on 8, 6, or 4, hopefully you can pick up  the number beneath it and you still hit 28"
784,0,5,9,12,13,14,0,0,21,26,"The strategy I chose is a tweaked version of “distribute troops proportional to the value of the castle, while abandoning the highest conflict Castles (historically 7 & 8) and the lowest point castle (Castle 1). I tweaked the exact numbers to fit my liking though.

My goal with this deployment was not to beat the top performers - it was to beat the field. Beating the #1 warlord is the same as beating anyone else after all.

I decided on this strategy by coming up with several theories on how to win, and testing them against an approximation of “the field” I created using the data provided by the previous contests and a Gaussian number generator. 333 “participants” were based off of the data from the first contest, 666 from the second, each of the top 5 strategies got 15 entries, and to make it an even 1150 the last participant placed 10’s in each castle.

Hopefully there aren’t too many people who copy-paste the winning lists, otherwise I’ll lose! While I calculated a roughly 70-75% win chance in total vs the field, and a solid 80% win chance vs the initial top 5, I literally lose to each of the most recent top 5. So... good luck to me? Hopefully this won’t blow up in my face!"
785,1,5,4,8,8,12,12,16,15,19,"My basic strategy was to distribute the troops in a proportion equal to the percentage of total points that each castle holds, rounded, with a twist! Each of these proportions were (1/55 * castle#). I believe this is the best mathematical solution, but I thought that others might have thought the same, so I conspired to beat them. For each even castle I added 1 troop, and subtracted 1 from each odd castle. This way, I will win ties against those who shared my thought process."
786,1,6,0,10,0,15,5,19,21,23,"I try to get the best of both worlds, as much as possible, by sending big battallions to the largest castles while still having a good chance of grabbing the even-numbered lower ones by punting on odd numbered low castles. It's a bizarre strategy that does well against the average strategies from both the other years as well as the winning strategies from those years.

I do have to punt on one of the bigger numbers, so I choose 7 since I think people tend to ""randomly"" select that one a lot, plus 7 is ""big enough to be important but not so big that others will get it, so I will"". I do still send 5 troops there to avoid losing to other strategies that punt there."
787,0,0,0,0,15,20,0,40,25,0,Choose four castles whose total point value is 28. Go all out for them.
788,4,4,5,12,12,12,2,3,23,23,"I understand the changes between the last two games to show that my fellow warlords are smart but not going down the path of ""if I do this then she does this then I'll do this and then she'll do this."" Basically, they're making first-order adjustments. This deployment will hopefully work against both the average players and also the ones making first-order adjustments. That's shown clearly in the second digit of all my guesses--I think people naturally go for round numbers, and then smart players go one over round numbers to beat the round number players, so I'm going three over to beat the first-order guesses. I also focused on return on investment. Theoretically I can win most of the smaller castles with this deployment, and then I only need to win one or two of the big ones. "
789,0,5,9,12,21,19,5,5,0,24,"My brother worked on this, and I think he was on the right track. But he failed to account for how many will just use variations of the plans that won last time. I used a set of info Thomas made from your last two warlord games and made a strategy that works almost as well, but specifically targets the winners of the previous two games. My goal here is to have just one or two more soldiers than my enemy in the areas I'm fighting, and abandon the places where my enemy puts the most soldiers. "
790,1,2,4,6,11,12,13,14,17,20,"Value is highest at 10, I presume that the lower values castles 5 and below are expendable."
791,0,0,0,0,0,10,10,10,35,35,A gross misunderstanding of all logic
792,3,6,6,16,19,12,12,20,3,3,"I found the average troop deployment of the top 5 placers from both of the last tournaments, and then I found a strategy that would beat them both on average."
793,1,1,3,3,3,4,19,24,20,22,"I would like to say I performed a complex game-theory simulation to optimize the outcome, but I basically eyeballed it to weight toward higher victory points without abandoning any castles; since the two previous contests had both the 7/8 and 9/10 focus strategies winning, I did not exclusively focus on either."
794,5,6,8,10,1,16,21,31,1,1,"In previous battles the winners took two different approaches. The first round the winners focused on castles 4,5,7,8. In the second the focus was on 4,5,9,10. My idea was to focus on 6/7/8. then capturing as many little castles as I could."
795,2,4,9,4,4,4,4,4,33,32,"Ensure I could beat both previous winners. This game is transitive, right?! It would be fun to know all the results! Maybe you can share the a google spreadsheet with everyone's answers, but maybe not our names and emails? :)"
796,5,5,5,5,0,0,0,10,30,40,"Intuition and guesswork based on the past data. Most generals had more even distributions and none of the top 10 had any allocations above 40. So if I capture the highest value prizes and a few of the smaller ones that garner less attention, I figure I should be in pretty good shape."
797,2,3,3,4,5,10,18,22,18,15,I tried to ride the wave from earlier deployments and emphasize the trough in the middle.
798,6,0,0,0,0,0,0,34,30,30,"A deliberate overkill strategy, designed to get exactly 28 points. If my guess is right then people will back down a bit on the bids on the higher, and still ignore the lower values. In this strategy you have to take the top 3, so the 1 value castle is the best hope to steal a final strategy. It just seemed like an interesting idea."
799,0,3,0,18,0,17,9,15,5,33,"The winning strategy in round 2 was primarily to take castles 4, 5, 9, and 10. I'm largely trying to disrupt that by using more force at 10 and 4. At the same time I'm trying to take 4, 6, 8, and 10 to get myself to 28."
800,1,2,2,4,4,25,26,26,5,5,The heart wants what the heart wants <3
801,0,0,0,5,7,10,21,24,33,0,Avoided overcommit on 10.  Attempted to stack 9 and upper middle.
802,1,1,1,6,15,20,25,25,5,1,I put the most troops in castles that were in the middle in points in attempt to win several smaller castles instead of a few larger ones.
803,4,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,13,14,Trying to get win at several castles with an emphasis towards the high point castles.  Weighting for each castle proportional to the square root of the value.
804,0,0,0,20,0,10,20,30,0,20,just felt intuitively good
805,1,2,22,1,1,22,1,1,27,22,"It's almost 4 am, this is better than anything"
806,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,33,33,34,Go big or go home
807,4,5,6,7,11,27,28,4,4,4,Guess
808,2,2,2,17,2,18,5,18,32,2,
809,3,3,6,11,14,2,27,27,2,5,
810,3,3,4,15,16,15,18,20,3,3,Not really sure
811,4,0,0,0,0,0,0,33,33,30,"Just need 28 points to win.  Figure I can almost always win 1 point with a small number on 1.  Then maximize my focus on 8, 9, and 10."
812,0,3,6,1,12,20,24,23,6,5,"Following the logic of last games winner, trying to optimize against those who optimize. Without too much thought."
813,1,1,1,1,11,19,19,1,21,25,I’m conceding the low-value castles and one of the most over-valued (#8). Then I concentrate forces for high-probability wins in the highest-scoring and mid-range castles. I’m also hoping to pick up some small gains from those who concede castles by listing 0 or 1.
814,3,3,6,15,20,25,25,1,1,1,to attack the other guys
815,1,1,1,2,30,1,2,2,30,30,I’m guaranteed at least one if not two high value castles while still having a chance at all of them
816,0,8,2,2,2,32,2,35,9,8,"hope most people ignore castle 9 and 10, and then go over 27 with castles 8 and 6"
817,1,2,4,11,16,20,21,16,5,4,"Short the larger castles where some may devote a lot of resources, focus on winning more of the castles in the middle. Pretty much the opposite of NBA shot optimization."
818,0,0,11,0,0,7,7,7,34,34,"I don't want to lose any large castle by a narrow margin, as this would be a significant waste of troops. If I win a large castle narrowly, this is the best scenario, but an overwhelming loss is also acceptable (since it will cost my opponent many troops to achieve this, and therefore give me numerical superiority elsewhere). It's like the electoral college!

In the previous rounds, players deployed troop amounts on the large castles that were either very small or very large. My strategy depends on my expectation that this pattern will repeat itself. I chose all of my troop placements with this in mind, determined not to lose any large castle narrowly against either of those strategies.

I invested heavily into castles 9 and 10, expecting to win their points almost every time. If I win one or both of them narrowly, then this is a significant boon to my efficiency. If I win them overwhelmingly, this is not as good, but for 19 points I'm willing to take the risk. I expect to defeat most players who conduct a predictable attack on one or both of these castles. If I lose either of these castles after such a large investment then I probably lose the match.

I expect to do well in castles 3, 6, 7, and 8. I'm vulnerable to opponents who attack three or more of these simultaneously with medium-sized forces while conceding castles 9 and 10, as some top finishers did in the first round, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. Any two of these mid-range castles, plus the 19 points above will give me the 28 points necessary for the win.

Castles 4 and 5 seem to have been highly overvalued in the earlier rounds, so I did not contest them at all. I am hoping to take an overwhelming loss here against opponents who try this again. If I lose them narrowly, that's unfortunate, but it won't matter too much. My path to 28 points is fairly difficult to block even without them."
819,0,11,11,11,11,11,11,11,11,12,leave out the 1 and always beat the mean
820,0,2,7,0,0,22,3,1,33,32,10+9+6+3 = 28 and both 6 & 3 are not common choices in previous editions.
821,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,Equal distribution beats the game theory.
822,0,0,2,30,2,30,2,34,0,0,Three eyed raven told me
823,0,0,0,10,0,0,0,30,25,35,Just a hunch I had based on previous editions
824,3,5,1,11,10,15,15,20,17,3,idk it’s 5am
825,0,0,0,0,0,19,23,27,31,0,"All focused on the fewest castles needed to win, avoiding the highest and lowest valued."
826,2,7,2,7,7,19,7,19,7,23,No even numbers. Only choose every second castle for real winning. Take a few to the rest to win against zeros.
827,2,3,3,7,10,14,18,21,18,4,"I figured I'd look at what strategy riddlers used last time.  I looked at both the mean and the median.  I started with the median set and increased most of the numbers 1.  I also compared this number set to the mean.  It won 35 of the 55 points.  So, why not go with that?  "
828,3,5,7,9,11,12,14,17,19,3,Forfeit the 10 points and win the others
829,0,1,3,3,7,7,8,22,23,26,
830,0,0,0,13,1,21,2,23,3,37,Felt right :)
831,2,2,2,4,4,19,19,22,23,3,Must beat Jason Weisman!!! Considered how he thinks and deployed troops to beat him. Also looked at previous results and guessed.
832,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,"Each point is worth about 1.8 troops. Distributing troops so as to pay approximately their value for each point led to this distribution. Seems to me that anyone overpaying elsewhere will spend more troops than they should for a castle, allowing me to pick up a different castle(s) at near troop value. The more they overspend anywhere, the worse this becomes for them. "
833,1,2,2,5,7,13,19,21,14,16,
834,7,0,0,0,0,0,0,31,31,31,28 to 27
835,0,1,2,8,3,15,18,20,3,30,Fancied a go aye
836,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,30,35,30,"No modelling, just a ten second guess on what others would do on average. (It's a no stakes game.) 28 is needed to win. 10 + 9 + 8 + 1 suffices. Naturally you'd expect them to be hotly contested, but this is well above the average content of those castles so let's let the last two round's data suggest it is worth a go attacking them. So let's sacrifice losing to players that take alternative strategies to see if this wins enough rounds against common submissions. And taking a complete guess that the peak of the contest will move from castle 8 to castle 9."
837,2,1,6,7,12,16,22,1,31,2,
838,0,0,0,0,0,17,18,30,35,0,
839,0,0,7,10,12,14,17,19,21,0,1 and 2 are low-value; 10 will be too heavily contested
840,2,0,6,1,0,0,22,0,40,29,"55 points to win, this is a race to 28. The quickest way to that is winning 9 & 10 and then then figuring how best to win one big-ish castle and win/split a small-ish (but not smallest) one. I focused on 7 because I thought the battle would be bigger for 8, and then 3 to win or split. That takes me to at least 27.5 with the hope that one of the other towers breaks my way (particularly the 1 point as a win or split)."
841,1,3,4,1,1,4,6,8,38,34,"A few simulations to find good strategies, and then searching for one that would perform well against those."
842,1,1,1,13,1,1,22,27,32,1,"28 points are needed to win so I decided to invest all of my soldiers in taking castles 4,7,8, and 9 for a total of 28 points. I decided this combination was less obvious than ones including 10, which I think will receive heavy investment from opponents, but still uses to smallest number of castles. A point is worth about 1.8 soldiers so I expect investing 3.2 soldiers per point in my castles to take them will win. I also put one point in each castle to have a win condition if I lose  one of my castles to a player also play a concentrated strategy."
843,1,1,2,2,15,11,0,5,33,30,"Worked against the 10 previous winners, plus uniform, plus heavy uniform, plus strategies from a friend."
844,0,0,0,8,18,19,21,30,3,1,Try to have a large enough force where opponents would not expect it.
845,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,1,"Strategy distributes based on points, dropping 10 to pack enemy into valuble territory and give a better advantage overall.  1 point initially to all castles to win in the event of no compete.  Remaining points distributed through castle 1-9 at a rate of 2:1"
846,2,3,4,6,8,10,13,15,19,20,"I started from simulating a tournament of 500 random players, that is, each players distribution of soldiers over their castles was uniformly sampled from all possible soldier configurations (at least I hope it was uniformly sampling from that). Then the top 5 players were taken and put aside. I then repeated this random tournament 99 more times to obtain 500 top 5 players. These players then competed in another tournament and I took out the top 5 players (top of the top players as I call them). Then I repeated this whole thing 99 more times to get 500 top of the top players. 

From these 500 top of the top players, I calculated the median placements for each battlefield. 

Then I repeated the above until I had a 10 medians for each battlefield. I took the mean of each battlefields medians and used the 10 means to calculate my strategy. 

I begin by allocating 1 soldier to each battlefield and set this as my starting configuration. Then I calculated the points per median soldier allocation for each battlefield. This would give me a way to rank which battlefields should be allocated to first. 

Going according to the highest points per median soldier allocation battlefield, I added to the battlefield the floor of the respective battlefields mean of medians. I went down the rankings until I ran out of soldiers or finished allocating to the last battlefield. 

If there were any remaining soldiers, I allocated one by one to the battlefield that had the highest points per soldier if adding one more soldier meant I won that battlefield.  

 "
847,1,3,5,7,11,15,17,19,21,1,"Sacrifice the king, win the rest, and maybe sneak the 10 if someone sacrifices harder. "
848,0,0,1,2,21,21,22,3,4,26,"Trying a 4-castle deployment, as it's just easier to rely on. Throwing a few around in the larger unattended castles in order to protect against other 4-castle deployments. This mostly beats the recent winners and isn't the obvious 10-8-7-6 that stomps the last round. I could be in trouble if people really try to jump on 10, though."
849,1,3,5,13,17,2,14,16,17,12,I just took an average of the distributions of the previous two winners
850,1,0,0,0,0,0,30,30,39,0,Highest % troops outside Castle 10
851,2,3,5,13,17,2,14,15,17,12,Averaging the two
852,0,0,0,0,0,20,0,0,40,40,"I wanted to deploy high numbers of troops to the highest value castles to get as close to victory at the beginning as possible. From there, it only takes 6 more points to win the game, so I put all my remaining troops in Castle 6 to have the best chance of taking the points needed to win."
853,0,1,1,2,18,16,3,25,31,3,"Winning strategies focused on capturing 4 castles that could get you over 28 points so stuck to that. Was hoping 6, 7, and 8 would still be relatively neglected and put my effort toward winning 9."
854,2,3,5,5,14,14,16,16,14,11,
855,1,1,8,1,2,2,23,27,3,32,"Hoping to win 10, 8, 7, and 3 for 28 points. Putting small numbers on everything else in hopes I can win some cheap points in case other things go wrong."
856,2,2,2,2,2,8,13,18,23,28,"2 points on each to hedge, dump the rest at high-value castles"
857,1,1,1,3,7,16,22,24,3,22,Worked off last time’s results and heavy fortification on number 9
858,0,2,3,16,2,3,23,24,24,3,I chose 28 points to contend for and 27 to (mostly) cede.
859,1,2,4,10,19,24,27,4,5,4,This feels nice
860,10,20,5,6,4,10,10,10,5,20,To keep castles unbalanced.
861,5,5,10,15,20,25,5,5,5,5,"Expecting that the hardest fighting will be for the most valuable castles this should leave the lesser value ones relatively undefended and easier to pick off.  However, for those who share my view a small commitment of troops is worthwhile in case others go for an all or nothing strategy and do not think high value targets are worth it.  Expecting to win 15 to 25 total victory points remaining consistently around or above average. "
862,0,0,0,20,0,0,26,26,28,0,"Maximizing distribution to minimum number of castles needed to win, while avoiding expense of castle 10.  "
863,5,5,5,5,5,10,10,15,15,25,If I can commit enough to with with higher value forts then the rest don't matter.
864,0,2,2,4,1,18,19,19,14,21,I ran 100000 different random combinations that summed to 100 against 500 random opposing combinations and then chose the distribution that resulted in the highest average point total against its 500 imaginary opponents.
865,1,6,2,16,3,26,8,32,3,3,"I put 3 at 9 & 10, noting how many winners had put 2 there in previous years, and then assuming others would borrow their strategy. I then overloaded on the even numbers to try to eke out victory."
866,3,5,7,17,10,16,19,15,5,3,"I reviewed and added both of the table of previous winners to an excel spreadsheet and manipulated the numbers until I won most matchups in against both sets of winners. The second winners appear to essentially concede 27 points (1,2,3,6,7,8) while the first winners in general sought their points in the 5-9 range. Unfortunately, you won't get an awesome math answer for my choices."
867,2,4,10,12,14,16,18,20,2,2,Strategy :)
868,1,2,6,20,20,20,26,1,2,2,"Getting 3 to 7 is sufficient for victory, so all others are just token moves in case the enemy didn't defend."
869,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,Gave more to more valuable castles without writing any off
870,1,1,6,9,1,13,26,4,4,35,"A lot of people seem to be going for castles 7 and 8 or 9 and 10, so I thought I would try to create a set-up to consistently win 7 and 10 and steal whichever of 8 and 9 they didn't go for. The rest of the distribution was designed to just tack on a few extra points--giving up castle 5 allowed me to put bigger point totals elsewhere."
871,5,5,5,10,20,25,30,0,0,0,trying for a plausible counter-intuitive plan
872,0,0,1,1,2,3,6,12,25,50,Keep cutting my troops in half starting from top to bottom
873,7,0,0,0,0,0,0,26,31,36,Protect the bag
874,2,3,4,5,8,12,16,24,26,0,"hit the higher valued castles harder, except for 10, which I believe my opponent will overvalue."
875,0,0,0,7,23,5,4,3,34,24,Beat the top player from last time then designed a strategy to beat that then designed a strategy to beat that
876,1,10,4,10,4,4,22,16,13,16," [0, 11, 4, 10, 4, 4, 22, 16, 13, 16"
877,1,1,8,5,15,3,15,8,27,17,
878,2,4,6,6,6,21,25,30,0,0,
879,0,2,3,3,15,21,3,21,5,27,"Just trying to win 10 and two of 5,6 and 8 , at which point a few small ones would get me over the line. "
880,1,1,2,1,10,20,25,30,5,5,"Using the data from two previous trials, I wanted to balance between the two winning strategies and maximize EV."
881,1,2,3,4,9,11,13,16,19,22,
882,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,6,77,2,Give up on castle 10 since lots of people will go for that. Try and guarantee 9 points from Castle 9. Never send 0 or 1 units to a castle since other folks will try that. Throw a few extra at Castle 7 and 8 in case others are thinking similar to me.
883,1,5,6,11,16,22,1,36,1,1,"Anticipating even, uniform placement with person using some 0s"
884,2,2,2,11,11,11,26,31,2,2,"Middle weighted, but no zero castles"
885,0,1,3,11,13,14,17,28,8,5,"Focus on the core 5, 6, 7, 8, hope to grab a few 9s and a few 10s."
886,2,2,2,2,12,20,25,35,0,0,I didn't try for 9 or 10 and went for 5-8.
887,1,1,2,10,1,8,8,9,26,34,"First I wanted to beat all 5 of the top 5 from the last time. Then I wanted to beat the build optimized to beat them. Then I wanted to beat the build optimized to beat that. After that I still had 42 troops left, so I started thinking about what I lose to. I lose to builds that are stronger on any of 6,7,8. The way to beat this could be either increase my 6-7-8 numbers or pick up points from elsewhere from that person. I decided that playing for the 9 might be a good idea. The 9 was really expensive last time, but it was enabled to do so by the low 6-7-8 numbers. I'm assuming that this person is beating some or all of my 6-7-8, so they can't shove on the 9 as well. I've fairly arbitrarily decided 26 on the 9. This leaves me 16. First, I'm putting at least 1 on each of the first 5 to punish any 0s. Now I have 11. I might want to put everything on 5, and that would be strong against people who were playing around the previous set where 5 was a huge spike for no reason, but the 5 could easily be a huge spike again for no reason so I don't want to put much into it. The 4 seems like a significantly better spot because it was lower the last time but still part of the spike which means people playing around the last time will avoid it. I'm putting 9 more (10 total) on the 4, leaving me 2 left to place. 1 is going on the 3 to play around 1s and the other is going on the 8 to put it at 9 because I was scared I would lose the 8."
888,3,3,4,5,3,16,23,7,17,19,"I'm counting on an overreaction to the distribution in 9 and 10 while focusing on the undervalued 7. It seems warlords are maximising the extremes though, so a token force to the lows should capture some value."
889,1,0,2,15,22,1,2,3,33,21,
890,10,0,0,0,0,0,0,15,25,50,Forces concentrated on minimum four castles to win
891,0,10,0,0,0,0,15,25,50,0,Forces concentrated on alternative 4 castles to win
892,2,2,2,1,2,2,16,24,24,25,WIn 28 and loose rest
893,0,0,1,1,15,20,20,1,1,41,"The most direct method of achieving a majority while (hopefully) limiting exposure to defeat by fielding more men along my prescribed victory path than does the opposition. 

No backup plan, no reserves. When in doubt, attack. "
894,0,0,0,0,18,22,22,33,0,5,Give up 5 castles expecting to split points on some of them. Maybe get a cheeky 10 against similar strategies.
895,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,46,46,"I'm predicting that most of your audience is pretty smart, and will have worked out that you only need 1, 8, 9 and 10 to win, and will have placed 25 soldiers on each of those castles. This strategy is designed specifically to beat that."
896,0,0,0,0,19,23,0,27,31,0,"Go all-in on 4 castles that give just enough points to win (28), ceding the other 27 points’ worth.  Stack a few more troops on the high value castles just because."
897,1,1,1,3,3,27,28,30,3,3,"Weighted on 6,7,8 which would get 21 out of needed 28 points to win, and cover just enough on the others to prevent easy steals"
898,0,0,1,2,21,14,3,33,4,22,"I ran a monte carlo with all the previous troop deployments, plus a bunch of variations on the previous successful strategy, and it popped out this trimodal distribution. Basically, I optimized a trimodal distribution to beat optimized bimodal deployments. "
899,0,0,0,0,3,11,21,21,22,22,Nothing complicated - just based on past winners and seems like an even mix across the top castles may work.
900,0,1,1,10,12,13,16,17,15,15,"This strategy is based on two data points: the average deployment in February and the the average deployment in May. It presumes the changes will continue linearly, and therefore this troop deployment is set to beat that presumed average deployment.

The troop deployment also forfeits castles 1, 2 and 3 to reinforce higher value castles."
901,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,Assigned soldiers proportional to castle value
902,1,3,4,6,15,21,3,19,8,20,"Castle 6, despite good value, has been ignored in the past two games. Castle 10 needs to be contested, but not with too many troops. Similarly, castle 8 should be one that there is a large play for. I expect many players to overcommit to castle 9 and waste a lot of troops for something I can easily overcome with castles 6, 8, and 5."
903,2,2,2,15,20,20,20,15,2,2,
904,1,5,6,9,5,4,10,20,0,40,"I've done these things before, and I know that people stack the second-highest value. I decided to go a more conservative approach and split a lot of things, stacking on those where less soldiers would be and retreat where others would stack."
905,0,1,1,2,2,20,11,24,11,28,It's a bifurcated attack on the previous two seasons.
906,1,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,32,32,Put a lot on high value targets + pick up the forgotten points. We'll see how it goes.
907,1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,Gave more to more valuable castles without writing any off
908,1,1,1,1,23,6,11,11,23,22,"First, leave nothing undefended.  Next, beat an naive even distribution (10 everywhere) and a distribution that concedes the first 5 and doubles up on the rest.  Bonus that it beats most of the previous winners and the top 10 from 10 million random strategies I ran on the computer."
909,1,1,1,1,1,10,15,10,34,26,"Looking at the last two top deployments and data breakdowns, the top deployments were throwing the bank at 9 and slightly less for 10.  My strategy is top-heavy; it is very dependent on winning the top end and all but sacrificing the lower end (one soldier per castle for the bottom five will claim undefended territories and nothing else).

The focus was on beating the winning strategies from the last cycle.  34 for castle 9 and 26 for castle 10 beats the top four cleanly, for a cost of 60 soldiers.  Castle 7 gets some value play, too, so 15 goes there, and 10 each for castles 6 and 8.  This leaves five soldiers to pick off anything undefended; our strategy is to win all or nearly all of the top 5, and then anything below is gravy.  Weaknesses are if they can claim the 6-8 and not sacrifice the bottom to do so; a tie or better on one of those three and winning 9 and 10 should bring victory."
910,0,0,0,4,4,10,17,28,32,5,"The additional deployment scheme was won with emphasis on castles 7 and 8 .. and in the reprise (second) simulation, the winning submission emphasized Castle #9 and #10.  By putting 0 soldiers in Castle #1, 2 and 3, I am going to concentrate my forces in Castles #6 - #9 with just putting enough soldiers in Castle #10 to avoid giving it away cheaply.  In addition, I am putting 4 soldiers each in Castles #4 and #5 as a way to score a few ""cheap"" points against people who concentrate almost exclusively in Castles #6 - 10."
911,1,2,2,2,11,15,17,22,15,13,COC
912,3,7,10,14,18,22,26,0,0,0,"I aimed to win 28 points (minimum for a simple majority out of 55), and targeted the lowest value castles to reach a 28-point total while avoiding committing troops to the high-value targets. My goal was to pay just over 3 troops per point. "
913,0,7,1,0,0,1,28,1,33,29,I took one of the better performing solutions from last simulation that seemed to work well against the other top solutions and tweaked it slightly.
914,1,1,0,0,0,15,20,31,30,2,"I figured most people would favor Castle 10, so I instead heavily reinforced Castles 8 and 9. I also left several troops in Castles 6 and 7. If I can win the middle numbers, I will be in good shape. "
915,2,5,10,10,15,15,20,23,0,0,"Trumpian Electoral college: ignore NY and CA, go for TX, PA, FL"
916,5,5,5,5,10,10,20,20,10,10,
917,23,0,2,1,1,1,1,23,24,24,"I placed at least 1 troop to every castle except for 2. I assume that my enemy sends at least 1 troop to every castle and therefore will give me the best chance to win 3. Next I assume the point of the game is to get 28 as there a total of 55 points. By dividing up all other amounts amongst the quickest way to make 28, (10+9+8+1) I have given myself the best chance to win those numbers."
918,2,3,7,9,10,10,18,20,6,15,Adds to 100
919,11,11,11,11,14,21,21,0,0,0,"I expect most people to put most of their troops in the higher numbered castles, so my strategy is to win the lowest 7."
920,1,1,1,11,11,20,25,30,0,0,"castle 9 and 10 would be the most valuable so should get the largest number of troops assigned to them by the other overlords so fighting over them would be the most pointless allocation of troops since you're most likely to lose there. castles 1-3 are of limited value so while they could safely be ignored you could steal one of them with minimal troop numbers. combining those 5 castles gives you 25 points which won't be enough to win. castles 6-8 are the most valuable as far as being high enough to want to take but not so high that you would risk sending all your troops to, so 20-30% of your forces should be enough to win those three, especially castle 8 as you've conceded 9 and 10 already so you have to win castle 8 . castles 4 and 5 are the risky ones as losing either one means you lose, but again aren't valuable enough for large troop dispositions. however in the event of the enemy dividing his troops evenly among all 10 castles I need to commit more than 10 troops to ensure victory. doing things this way should give me a 30-25 victory "
921,1,1,1,1,9,9,1,21,26,30,"Trying to optimize from the second iteration, should perform well against people who go for the low castle value strategy"
922,1,1,3,20,4,3,16,3,28,21,Wanted to send at least a few to every castle. Focused on the biggest ones but couldn't go all out. I did look at previous winners but still feels like a total guess.
923,0,2,2,16,21,11,26,16,3,3,Trying to pick 1 more than round numbers.  Concentrating on the mid-value castles
924,2,4,6,12,16,18,20,22,0,0,
925,0,0,0,20,20,20,20,20,0,0,Why not?
926,0,0,0,0,10,12,15,18,21,24,Started proportionally and then let go of the lesser castles
927,0,0,12,1,1,23,3,3,33,24,Used a genetic algorithm (the same as last competition) to explore distributions that would be good against the second round distributions and the first and second round distributions combined. Then used the same algorithm to optimize against *those* and the first and second round distributions simultaneously.
928,1,2,1,12,22,4,8,10,23,17,I used an excel sheet and found a strategy by trial and error and some calculations that would best every previous winning line up and that would also beat the average line up.
929,1,2,1,12,22,4,8,10,23,17,I used an excel sheet and found a strategy by trial and error and some calculations that would best every previous winning line up and that would also beat the average line up.
930,3,6,7,10,10,18,16,14,1,15,"General ramping-up from low to high, leaving out one high to improve the chances on the others"
931,3,2,5,5,10,20,20,20,10,5,"Best to at least contest the small ones, 10 is gonna be over deployed y a lot of people. Capturing the soft gooey middle should rack up enough points to win a fair number."
932,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,91,
933,3,4,5,4,4,4,31,4,37,4,"Try to guarantee 9 and 7 and pick up 12+ elsewhere

"
934,0,1,2,4,5,12,15,16,8,37,"On castles 10, 8, 7, and 6, I'm trying to overbid by a small margin those who are trying to overbid the last round by a small margin. On 4, 5, and 9, I'm trying to lose by a wide margin to those who overbid on those castles, while still beating anyone who more or less drops out of those battles completely."
935,2,3,4,7,10,12,16,20,24,2,
936,1,8,8,16,18,5,0,19,5,20,"I just looked at the previous rounds of winners. Both rounds, there was an effort to win 4 and 5, so I assume there's some reason that works. 1 is pretty much negligible so I threw it. Most winners also didn't try hard for 6, so I followed that as well. There seems to have been an increase in efforts towards 2, 3 by the second round, so I followed that too. Then I just chose two out of the last 4 to make a push for. I did 8 and 10 cause I figured 9 and 10 would be a common strategy."
937,1,1,1,1,6,15,20,25,20,10,bet big on large numbers w/o surrendering anything
938,0,0,0,5,10,10,15,30,20,10,Just giving away the low point castles and loading up on the 8 and 9 but hoping to eke some wins out of the 10 and 7
939,0,1,3,13,14,5,1,2,35,26,"Similar strategy as Round 2 winners, with some small shifts that seek to contest castles 9 and 10 more vigorously while devoting a few more troops to potentially undervalued castles like castle 6."
940,3,3,3,11,2,6,12,31,1,28,
941,3,4,4,4,24,6,6,7,8,34,"Last time people frequently went with a strategy where they stacked castles that gave them exactly 28 points. I'm trying to steal one of the ones they stacked, while picking up the ones they left relatively undefended."
942,1,5,11,1,1,22,26,3,3,27,
943,3,3,3,3,3,5,15,20,20,25,"Looked at previous good ones, made some guesses on how people would respond this time around"
944,0,1,5,20,4,10,0,10,10,40,Random
945,0,0,2,3,20,20,20,2,2,31,"Castles 8 and 9 received a lot of attention in the previous two iterations, respectively, because of various assumptions about the other players. We’ll see if this will work, but 10/7/6/5 are enough to win, and I’m gambling on any deployment that beats one of those splitting other castles with me."
946,0,0,0,0,6,5,11,18,28,32,Top Heavy
947,0,0,2,2,5,5,29,1,1,55,winning #10 cancels out the first 4 if lost. then 567 > 89 so put more there.
948,2,2,2,13,17,2,3,5,33,21,Estimate near last winners
949,4,5,6,7,7,14,19,24,7,7,"Wanted a reasonable chance of winning castles 6,7,8 along with a decent chance of winning the other ones by generally deploying 7 troops since it's likely that 2-7 will win some of them based on past history."
950,1,1,5,16,19,1,1,1,31,24,
951,0,0,4,5,17,16,25,0,0,33,
952,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,20,30,50,Seemed smart
953,2,1,5,7,9,13,1,18,20,24,
954,1,5,7,15,1,1,1,1,34,34,"Designed to defeat the average player; effectively giving away castles 1, 5, 6, 7 and 8 (27 points) while focusing soldiers on castles 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 (28 points)"
955,1,1,10,1,1,1,1,21,27,36,Need 28 points so I focused on that but didn’t give any away
956,3,6,2,12,2,18,2,25,28,2,"Using java, I found how often flipping a castle would change the outcome of a war (given a random distribution of castles beforehand).  This actually is fairly predictive of how many troops the top players sent to the castles they wanted to win.  

Most winning players picked a selection of targets that added to just more than 27, so thats what I did too.  There wasn't much method to the madness, I just picked the ones that I thought would win this time around, not too different from past combinations but not too similar.

My targets were 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, adding to 30 points.  I am sending an appropriate number of troops to each target, and 2 scouts to the other four castles to maybe win against single scouts or cause ties.

Here's a desmos link: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/41xuwxlaeq"
957,0,8,2,9,2,15,26,2,32,4,"I dug up a spreadsheet that I made in 2017 to plan for round 2 of this challenge.  I remember putting a fair amount of thought into it (optimizing against the results of round 1, and then making some tweaks whose details I can't remember), but then I forgot to submit it.  So this may be based on outdated intel, but it'll have to do--2019 Ravi doesn't have as much free time as 2017 Ravi."
958,0,2,2,2,12,16,2,27,35,2,total guess
959,2,7,6,8,3,19,0,21,25,9,"I set up a simulation that would generate entirely random deployments for my team. Then, I had them fight 100 battles against an enemy that placed their somewhat randomly (not entirely random like my deployments, but weighted more towards deploying more at higher castles). This distribution was the best of 10,000 random deployments."
960,1,8,11,20,6,6,6,6,33,3,"I'm betting on most players putting the majority of their troops on 4 castles that add up to 28. By stacking high numbers of troops on 4 and 9 I hope to disrupt this strategy. Most of the 4 combo castles to reach 28 will include 4 or 9 or both. For example: the winning strategy in the 2nd run of this game was to take 4,5,9,10. Against most players using that strategy I can easily take 2,3,6,7,8. So I just need to have enough to tie either 4 or 9 for a win"
961,4,7,9,10,15,20,0,35,0,0,"Since I figured most would go for the large numbered castles, I decided not to contest those, instead choosing to go with a more conservative strategy in which I compiled that lower numbers to form a small majority."
962,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,(points for castle/total castle points)*100=troops deployed
963,1,1,1,10,4,10,7,22,18,26,"No good reasons, just playing."
964,0,0,8,11,15,18,22,0,26,0,It looked about right.
965,5,5,10,10,15,15,20,20,0,0,"Slightly higher than the average for each castle from the last two games. Ignored castles 9 and 10. Adds up to 36 maximum points, well enough to win. Even if losing castles 7 and 8, can still win. "
966,0,0,0,11,0,0,27,31,31,0,"No point putting a small number of soldiers in a castle as you get no points for a loss. 9+8+7+4=28 is just over half the maximum (55). I think a bunch of people will go all in on 10, 9, 8, 1 with a 30,30,30,10 spread and this will beat that. Similarly, this beats a 25-25-25-25 spread on 10,9,8,7 and the 10 on all castles approach. Finally by ignoring castle 10, we also beat the strategies that put alot on castle 10 and spread a little to everything else which I think might be common."
967,0,0,0,6,12,18,26,32,3,3,
968,0,1,2,3,4,5,10,15,20,40,
969,1,1,1,11,1,1,26,28,29,1,"Need 28 points to the win, focused on fewest points castles necessary to achieve that goal"
970,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,1,3,"The last two time people won with a more focused approach on just a couple castles. I think enough people will try and copy that so, a spread out approach might work. Or not and I will loss terribly."
971,0,3,3,11,13,16,4,4,22,24,"Notice clustering in first 4 numbers on troup distributions in all castles -- so worth getting ahead of that, except on castle 1.  Castle 7 and 8 still most heavily contested, so let others seriously fighting for them have them.  "
972,0,5,7,9,11,13,0,0,23,32,I pretended I was playing against my brothers Devon and Nate. So hopefully people generally think like the two of them.
973,0,0,5,15,20,5,0,0,25,30,God told me.
974,4,5,7,11,13,15,18,25,1,1,"My starting point was to look at the number of men that would be needed to beat the averages from both previous battles -- {4 5 7 9 11 14 17 20 17 13}. Then, I figured out the cheapest way to get 28 points with that number of men in each castle -- I came up with {0 0 0 9 11 0 0 0 17 13}, using 50 men. I then tried to counter that strategy, eventually deciding on punting the ""most valuable"" castles 9 and 10 and reinforcing the castles I felt I needed to do best in (4, 5, and 8). "
975,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14,18,Trying to balance protecting/winning the high-value targets and preventing token squads from picking off the low-value forts
976,7,11,11,11,12,21,21,2,2,2,To counter groups focusing too much on higher value castles and also those who may send nobody to them.
977,1,2,5,17,11,13,16,18,0,17,"Counter positions of most successful players from last time, while exceeding averages."
978,0,0,2,3,10,15,17,17,18,18,"Because in the last battle the most successful warlords targeted the middle and top numbered castles with an overwhelming number of troops, I wanted to spread my points more evenly across castles with a value of five or higher (because even if you conquer the lower castles you still lose). This general strategy might be susceptible to players who cluster their soldiers at the top, but I am hoping to split the difference and more evenly spread my troops in the hope that when the smoke clears I can - to paraphrase Varys from Game of Thrones - be king of the ashes."
979,1,1,1,12,20,20,21,20,2,2,Optimize the middle values assuming they are under deployed
980,2,1,2,5,5,20,20,20,25,0,"Assuming the opposing warlord would place the highest value on Castle 10, I instead tried to capitalize on castles 6 to 9 in order to try and solidify my points gains."
981,0,0,0,0,0,25,25,25,25,0,
982,0,0,2,3,12,15,18,11,5,34,28 to win. Win 10. Win any 3 of 5-8.
983,2,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,18,"I chose a simple strategy: based on the total points available, determine the number of points per soldier, and deploy the appropriate number of soldiers to each castle assuming they would win that number of points.  While this strategy does not account for the slight differences in over and undervaluing deployment if one is rounding up or rounding down (since only whole numbers of soldiers can be deployed), it should (in theory) help to appropriate weight the value of all castles and penalize opponents who skew their distribution of soldiers too heavily in any direction."
984,3,3,3,3,3,17,17,17,17,17,This strategy is to spread a wide net. Which clearly hasn't worked so far. But lets try it
985,2,2,2,10,10,20,2,2,25,25,"Basically, I assume people will see what happened last time (lots of troops in 4,5,9, and 9) and avoid those this time. So I put troops there."
986,2,2,3,3,14,18,25,25,2,6,"Target middle value castles (5, 6, 7, 8) with larger forces while deploying a midsized force to castle 10."
987,1,2,2,3,4,6,9,14,22,37,fibonacci is awesome so fibonacci +1 must be better
988,0,3,6,11,13,16,0,51,0,0,Because you need to get to 28 to win so maximum chance of getting to 28
989,1,1,1,1,1,1,14,25,25,30,Concentrated on high value targets
990,10,14,14,14,14,14,20,0,0,0,Total of 55 points.  Need 28 to Win.
991,0,0,10,0,22,0,0,0,34,34,I only need 28 points to win and castles 9&10 seemed undervalued by the average player. I’ve gone all in on four castles.
992,20,10,10,11,12,15,22,0,0,0,It is a race to 28 points.  Chosen locations least likely to be fought for.
993,1,2,4,6,9,11,21,22,22,2,"I'm guessing people will over deploy to 10, so I'm sacrificing it to strengthen 7-9, with the suspicion that people will also go for round numbers like 20, or go 1 over that. Otherwise a proportional distribution slightly less weighted at the start, where I suspect people will underdeploy. "
994,6,5,5,25,18,13,10,7,6,5,
995,2,4,5,7,9,10,13,15,16,19,Proportional representation of the troops based on the points of the castle
996,5,6,6,8,13,22,27,4,4,5,slightly above average plus one on most with choice wins from 5-7
997,1,9,1,1,14,19,25,30,0,0,Aim to get just 28 points
998,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,37,Massing at castle 10 takes it out of the equation (against most stratagies). This means only 18 points needed out of the remaining 45 points. Best strategy is to equally distribute so as to win the castles less protected by the opponents strategy to get over the top.
999,1,2,10,6,21,1,16,11,11,21,trying to beat common breakpoints/ round numbers
1000,1,11,1,1,1,1,1,20,28,35,"Focus+surprise. 







"