As you may recall in Paper-Rock-Scissors, I made all the units attack all opponents simultameously. There's a big reason for this: the strategy of choosing which unit to attack is a major strategy in and of itself.
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval battle between the French and the British during the Napoleonic Wars. It's significant because the British won the battle, even though the French had superior numbers. The clever British commander Admiral Lord Nelson decided to divide his fleet into two flanking forces and focus on sinking one ship instead of wounding several. This was contrary to conventional naval warfare. As a result, his ships were able to down French ships at a much quicker rate, which caused the French fleet's firepower to decrease exponentially while the British suffered only linear loses. Because of this unusual outcome, the Battle of Trafalgar is often used as a case-study for mathematical modeling military encounters.
Today, most gamers already know this strategy--if you "focus fire" your attacks on a single unit, you can decimate your opponents at an exponential rate. I wanted to incorporate this into Paper-Rock-Sciscors, but I still had the problem of which unit to attack. Should pure teams focus on attacking the units they are strongest against (agressive) or should they focus on the units that are strongest against them? Should the minorities in hybrid teams attack the same target as the majority, or should they play to their own optimal target? I didn't want to compound the experiments, so I made everyone attack everything. But now, I'm going to analyze those questions independantly.
The Game:
To simplify, let's define the RTS game to only have 2 classes--let's say, Fire and Ice. Each unit has equal effective against itself. However, Fire is twice as effective against Ice, and Ice is twice as effective against Fire. Two teams will face off, each with a combination of Fire and Ice that equals 9 total. The game will be: what is the most effective target solution for each of the nine units? Does this change as a function of team makeup, or is the best strategy universal?
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval battle between the French and the British during the Napoleonic Wars. It's significant because the British won the battle, even though the French had superior numbers. The clever British commander Admiral Lord Nelson decided to divide his fleet into two flanking forces and focus on sinking one ship instead of wounding several. This was contrary to conventional naval warfare. As a result, his ships were able to down French ships at a much quicker rate, which caused the French fleet's firepower to decrease exponentially while the British suffered only linear loses. Because of this unusual outcome, the Battle of Trafalgar is often used as a case-study for mathematical modeling military encounters.
Today, most gamers already know this strategy--if you "focus fire" your attacks on a single unit, you can decimate your opponents at an exponential rate. I wanted to incorporate this into Paper-Rock-Sciscors, but I still had the problem of which unit to attack. Should pure teams focus on attacking the units they are strongest against (agressive) or should they focus on the units that are strongest against them? Should the minorities in hybrid teams attack the same target as the majority, or should they play to their own optimal target? I didn't want to compound the experiments, so I made everyone attack everything. But now, I'm going to analyze those questions independantly.
The Game:
To simplify, let's define the RTS game to only have 2 classes--let's say, Fire and Ice. Each unit has equal effective against itself. However, Fire is twice as effective against Ice, and Ice is twice as effective against Fire. Two teams will face off, each with a combination of Fire and Ice that equals 9 total. The game will be: what is the most effective target solution for each of the nine units? Does this change as a function of team makeup, or is the best strategy universal?
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