Problem with trivial choice bonuses

There should not be a 1 to 1 ratio of officers to soldiers, that is far too much administrative overhead. One officer should raise morale of soldiers in a radius, that makes it tactical is it is based on position and much harder for players to min-max.

I assume no map, just army as one formation consisting of list of units.

Anyway, you can replace this with factory producing 1 good and powerplant that increases all factories output by 10%. It's exactly the same problem.

Trivial, static optimization problem has trivial, static solution. News at 11.

How I'd extend that system is 100% up to the rest of the game.

Perhaps you're looking for the concept of diminishing returns?

Quote:

from Google Search: "define: diminishing returns": In economics, diminishing returns (also called diminishing marginal returns) refers to how the marginal production of a factor of production starts to progressively decrease as the factor is increased, in contrast to the increase that would otherwise be normally expected. According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (say factory size and labor), each additional unit of the variable input (i.e., man-hours) yields smaller and smaller increases in outputs, also reducing each worker's mean productivity. Conversely, producing one more unit of output will cost increasingly more (owing to the major amount of variable inputs being used, to little effect). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

Essentially, beyond a certain threshold, adding additional officers without adding additional troops will dimish the effect of said officers; for example, a group of 10 soldiers with 1 officer might gain a 10% morale boost from the officer, but a group of 10 soldiers with 2 officers might only gain a 15% boost.

Not that there is still -- and without the addition of other factors always will be -- an optimal balance, it's just more complex.



What if losing an officer had a loss of morale; not only do you lose the 10% bonus, but your troops will actually be less effective than normal for a while. Assuming an officer is easier to kill than a soldier, this would make it a risky proposition to have a larger number of officers in a group.

Again, without additional factors there will still be an optimal balance.

Well, if you just optimize for ONE goal, there is typically only one way to solve it, and even if there are multiple ones, its still pretty meaningless.

So you want multiple goals, not just one. That way the player has to make a choice.

For example, you could do the following:

- A soldier has the efficiency of 1 if no officer is present
- A soldier has the efficiency of 2 if at least one officier is present, but this works only for 10 soldiers per officer

- An officer has the efficiency of 2 if less than 3 soldiers and no other officer are present
- An officer has the efficiency of 0 if at least 3 soldiers, but no other officers are present
- An officer has the efficiency of 1 if another officer is present

Now instead of optimizing a single variable, take into account that soldiers and officers might get killed. So the player has to make choices - get that last bit of efficiency, or be safer from total loss of officers.

I though about two solution that let us keep only one goal.

1) Hidden information.
If you have more officers than other player your soldiers get +20% bonus. Works good in multiplayer, in singleplayer rather useless.

2) Different cost structure and investment dilemma.
Each factory cost 100 money and add +1 to production, each powerplant adds +10% to factories efficiency but the cost is arithmetic/geometrical. The perfect ratio is still here, but player do not always want a perfect ratio, there is investment cost involved since later powerplant will require saving money for a while, on the other hand player can always afford next factory. Depending on the stage of the game and the pressure for instant production increase the decision might be different.


Althrough, I don't like these solutins too much :D