Calculating survival and value numbers is straightforward in some cases (e.g. 6 Miners plus a brewer has a readily calculable chance of digging too deep.)
It’s much harder in other cases. Your submission, for example, is very hard to calculate expected value for—you need to buy some of your fuel...and you have exterior access half the time but not the other half...and in order to get your first bit of money with which to buy the first fuel your miners need to hit at least one coal...running a simulation for this is much easier than trying to calculate it.
I suppose I could have explicitly calculated some numbers that were easy and Monte Carlod the ones that were hard, but the second reason to Monte Carlo it is that I’m lazy and Monte Carloing everything is much simpler. In order to create the dataset I already needed to write code to simulate a fort, and once I have that code it’s very easy to just say ‘okay, now run it 100k times with these inputs.’
Well done on your performance—even if not the top performance, you both guaranteed survival and beat the King on value, so you clearly made some good progress!
Well, I did okayish for a first time player, but I didn’t get to the top. Not an unexpected result however.
Question, why do you Monte Carlo win rates rather than calculate them?
Calculating survival and value numbers is straightforward in some cases (e.g. 6 Miners plus a brewer has a readily calculable chance of digging too deep.)
It’s much harder in other cases. Your submission, for example, is very hard to calculate expected value for—you need to buy some of your fuel...and you have exterior access half the time but not the other half...and in order to get your first bit of money with which to buy the first fuel your miners need to hit at least one coal...running a simulation for this is much easier than trying to calculate it.
I suppose I could have explicitly calculated some numbers that were easy and Monte Carlod the ones that were hard, but the second reason to Monte Carlo it is that I’m lazy and Monte Carloing everything is much simpler. In order to create the dataset I already needed to write code to simulate a fort, and once I have that code it’s very easy to just say ‘okay, now run it 100k times with these inputs.’
Well done on your performance—even if not the top performance, you both guaranteed survival and beat the King on value, so you clearly made some good progress!