Different resources seem anticorrelated, including coal level.
All non-coal resources seem about equally common.
Coal is skewed so that higher values are much more common.
There is never less than 4 total coal level + quantity of other resources (perhaps due to dwarves not sending expeditions to anything less?). The coal skew is too much to be explained by this, but I haven’t checked if it can explain the general anticorrelation.
Expedition size looks like 9+2d4, all professions equally common, didn’t notice anything that would suggest non-randomness.
Larger expeditions tend to do a lot better than smaller ones.
Miners are in general by far the best profession for fort value, though not good for survival.
Farmers, Brewers and Warriors are the best professions for survival, especially Farmers.
All other professions look bad in terms of correlations with either measure of success.
However, high value forts generally don’t have a lot of missing professions, suggesting that some value is obtained by keeping around lower-effectiveness professions instead of min-maxing. Even crafters, who on average are by far the worst profession for fort value with our resources.
so… GuySrinivasan’s proposal looks pretty good.
However: the highest value forts with our non-coal resource combination in light forest, while they tend to have lots of miners, also tend to have a decent number of smiths. On the other hand, on average miners still get good value, and smiths bad value, even with these resources. Which suggests smiths might have some narrower requirements to get good value out of. Something to look into.
Among expeditions which were the best for their size and resource combinations, while they tend to have a lot of miners, our resources are correlated with them having less miners, and more smiths. So, the hypothetical smith-based strategy might be especially viable with our specific resources.
Also warriors might be better for value in our biome than farmers, and while I see that several 1/1/1 Farmer/Brewer/Warrior expeditions failed in the Light Forest biome with our non-coal resources (and even with our value of 1 coal), I didn’t see any 1/1/2 failures.
Also smiths might have synergy with warriors, both based on priors and based on, among top forts for their resources combos, smiths and warriors being relatively weakly anticorrelated compared with most other profession combos. (Brewers and miners are positively correlated among top forts though! hmm)
So, though I’d like to further analyze the smith strategy (and really, it would be more prudent to go with miners until I understand it) and also what exactly causes failure, I for now will go with:
Edit: meh, looking at general stats (not specifically at these resources), combined with the initial evidence for smiths being really weak, was making me really nervous about smiths even before seeing yonge’s report that more than one smith is counterproductive .
Entropy. For any criteria we filter the dataset by, the results will tend to be skewed toward high entropy, and low-entropy criteria will reduce the amount of data. Examples:
If at least 3 farmers or at least 3 brewers never fail for size 13 forts as long as there are 4 or fewer miners, but 5 miners requires 4 farmers or brewers and 6 miners requires 5 farmers or brewers to achieve the same result, does this mean that miners eat more food or does it mean that extra miners cause the fort to fail for an unrelated reason (e.g. they delve too greedily and too deep), and requiring more farmers/brewers simply reduces the number of cases to the point that the Balrog simply didn’t show up for those combinations in the dataset?
Is a split of <n> brewers and farmers really worse than <n> brewers or <n> farmers alone, or does requiring <n> brewers or <n> farmers just reduce the probability that there are enough miners to summon the Balrog?
partial followup for the above:
For size 13 forts, at least 3 total brewers and farmers is 100% effective against fort failure as long as there are no more than 4 miners.
I was hoping to see some protection from warriors in forts with at least 3 total brewers and farmers and lots of miners (to confirm my guess that the alternative threat, if it exists, might be something that warriors would fight) but the numbers of data points are low, and maybe there’s some benefit for 1 warrior over 0, but more warriors than 1 seems likely harmful for some reason (is there something else needed to defeat the Balrog, if it exists, that they are displacing? or are they just displacing farmers and brewers, and there’s no Balrog but miners eat more food after all?) (edit: this was specific to size 13 and low data, likely random)
later added remarks:
Not seeing convincing evidence of anything really affecting failure from the Balrog other than number of miners.
Food threshold to guarantee no non-Balrog fort failure increases to 4 farmers+brewers for fort sizes 14+.
Balrog miner threshold seems independent of fort size. Fort failure rate for forts with enough food producers for their size is about 1 in 220 for 5 miners, 1 in 13 for 6 miners, 1 in 5 for 7 miners, 1 in 4 for 8 miners, and literally 1 in 3 (only 3 data points) for 9 miners.
Farmers/Brewers/Warriors Fail rate, restricting to 4 Miners and below (to avoid the Balrog), and considering size 13 in Light Forest only:
2/0/0 100%
1/1/0 100%
0/2/0 100%
2/0/1 ~35%
1/1/1 ~50%
0/2/1 100%
2/0/2 0%
1/1/2 0%
0/2/2 ~35%
Additional warriors beyond two don’t seem to make a difference (at least for this biome and size).
This is all biome related; Tundra at size 13 for instance has quite a small (1/19) fail rate with 2 Farmers, 0 Brewers and 0 Warriors. Size also matters (at least 13 and under vs 14 and over) as previously noted.
I’m confused as to interpretation of this, but there’s a practical takeaway that the following should be sufficient for survival for expedition size 13 in Light Forest (sample sizes low but sharpish 100-to-0 cutoffs are giving me (perhaps unjustified) confidence):
At most 4 miners, plus any one of:
2 total Farmers and Brewers, at least one of which is a Farmer, plus at least 2 Warriors, or
At least 3 total Farmers and Brewers (as previously noted).
(I want to survive, but not devote additional resources to survival than needed, but it seems warriors are useful to value, and I think abstractapplic is probably correct about ore-based and wood-based pathways, but I think ore-based is better) :
Miners: 4
Smiths: 3
Woodcutters: 1
Farmers: 1
Brewers: 1
Warriors: 2
Crafters: 1
Wait, that’s exactly what I had before and crossed out, lol.
initial observations and analysis:
Different resources seem anticorrelated, including coal level.
All non-coal resources seem about equally common.
Coal is skewed so that higher values are much more common.
There is never less than 4 total coal level + quantity of other resources (perhaps due to dwarves not sending expeditions to anything less?). The coal skew is too much to be explained by this, but I haven’t checked if it can explain the general anticorrelation.
Expedition size looks like 9+2d4, all professions equally common, didn’t notice anything that would suggest non-randomness.
Larger expeditions tend to do a lot better than smaller ones.
Miners are in general by far the best profession for fort value, though not good for survival.
Farmers, Brewers and Warriors are the best professions for survival, especially Farmers.
All other professions look bad in terms of correlations with either measure of success.
However, high value forts generally don’t have a lot of missing professions, suggesting that some value is obtained by keeping around lower-effectiveness professions instead of min-maxing. Even crafters, who on average are by far the worst profession for fort value with our resources.
so… GuySrinivasan’s proposal looks pretty good.
However: the highest value forts with our non-coal resource combination in light forest, while they tend to have lots of miners, also tend to have a decent number of smiths. On the other hand, on average miners still get good value, and smiths bad value, even with these resources. Which suggests smiths might have some narrower requirements to get good value out of. Something to look into.
Among expeditions which were the best for their size and resource combinations, while they tend to have a lot of miners, our resources are correlated with them having less miners, and more smiths. So, the hypothetical smith-based strategy might be especially viable with our specific resources.
Also warriors might be better for value in our biome than farmers, and while I see that several 1/1/1 Farmer/Brewer/Warrior expeditions failed in the Light Forest biome with our non-coal resources (and even with our value of 1 coal), I didn’t see any 1/1/2 failures.
Also smiths might have synergy with warriors, both based on priors and based on, among top forts for their resources combos, smiths and warriors being relatively weakly anticorrelated compared with most other profession combos. (Brewers and miners are positively correlated among top forts though! hmm)
So, though I’d like to further analyze the smith strategy (and really, it would be more prudent to go with miners until I understand it) and also what exactly causes failure, I for now will go with:Miners: 4Smiths: 3Woodcutters: 1Farmers: 1Brewers: 1Warriors: 2Crafters: 1Edit: meh, looking at general stats (not specifically at these resources), combined with the initial evidence for smiths being really weak, was making me really nervous about smiths even before seeing yonge’s report that more than one smith is counterproductive .
A recurring theme to my thoughts on this one:
Entropy. For any criteria we filter the dataset by, the results will tend to be skewed toward high entropy, and low-entropy criteria will reduce the amount of data. Examples:
If at least 3 farmers or at least 3 brewers never fail for size 13 forts as long as there are 4 or fewer miners, but 5 miners requires 4 farmers or brewers and 6 miners requires 5 farmers or brewers to achieve the same result, does this mean that miners eat more food or does it mean that extra miners cause the fort to fail for an unrelated reason (e.g. they delve too greedily and too deep), and requiring more farmers/brewers simply reduces the number of cases to the point that the Balrog simply didn’t show up for those combinations in the dataset?
Is a split of <n> brewers and farmers really worse than <n> brewers or <n> farmers alone, or does requiring <n> brewers or <n> farmers just reduce the probability that there are enough miners to summon the Balrog?
partial followup for the above:
For size 13 forts, at least 3 total brewers and farmers is 100% effective against fort failure as long as there are no more than 4 miners.
I was hoping to see some protection from warriors in forts with at least 3 total brewers and farmers and lots of miners (to confirm my guess that the alternative threat, if it exists, might be something that warriors would fight) but the numbers of data points are low, and
maybe there’s some benefit for 1 warrior over 0, but more warriors than 1 seems likely harmful for some reason (is there something else needed to defeat the Balrog, if it exists, that they are displacing? or are they just displacing farmers and brewers, and there’s no Balrog but miners eat more food after all?)(edit: this was specific to size 13 and low data, likely random)later added remarks:
Not seeing convincing evidence of anything really affecting failure from the Balrog other than number of miners.
Food threshold to guarantee no non-Balrog fort failure increases to 4 farmers+brewers for fort sizes 14+.
Balrog miner threshold seems independent of fort size. Fort failure rate for forts with enough food producers for their size is about 1 in 220 for 5 miners, 1 in 13 for 6 miners, 1 in 5 for 7 miners, 1 in 4 for 8 miners, and literally 1 in 3 (only 3 data points) for 9 miners.
More on survival:
Farmers/Brewers/Warriors Fail rate, restricting to 4 Miners and below (to avoid the Balrog), and considering size 13 in Light Forest only:
2/0/0 100%
1/1/0 100%
0/2/0 100%
2/0/1 ~35%
1/1/1 ~50%
0/2/1 100%
2/0/2 0%
1/1/2 0%
0/2/2 ~35%
Additional warriors beyond two don’t seem to make a difference (at least for this biome and size).
This is all biome related; Tundra at size 13 for instance has quite a small (1/19) fail rate with 2 Farmers, 0 Brewers and 0 Warriors. Size also matters (at least 13 and under vs 14 and over) as previously noted.
I’m confused as to interpretation of this, but there’s a practical takeaway that the following should be sufficient for survival for expedition size 13 in Light Forest (sample sizes low but sharpish 100-to-0 cutoffs are giving me (perhaps unjustified) confidence):
At most 4 miners, plus any one of:
2 total Farmers and Brewers, at least one of which is a Farmer, plus at least 2 Warriors, or
At least 3 total Farmers and Brewers (as previously noted).
Current proposal:
(I want to survive, but not devote additional resources to survival than needed, but it seems warriors are useful to value, and I think abstractapplic is probably correct about ore-based and wood-based pathways, but I think ore-based is better) :
Miners: 4
Smiths: 3
Woodcutters: 1
Farmers: 1
Brewers: 1
Warriors: 2
Crafters: 1
Wait, that’s exactly what I had before and crossed out, lol.