Quote:
Originally Posted by Bongle
2008 or 2006 would be better choices than 2007 as proxies because your score was approximately proportional to what you did in the game and how many times you did it, much like Lunacy. Lunacy will have less lopsided scoring than either because even if your alliance's robots are all horrible and can't score, your human players can still rack up some points.
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This is a good point to an extent. I agree that 2006 would be better for a midgame score sampling, though my statements also took into account the endgame and the big picture... which takes additional research and time to get right, so maybe it's inapplicable.
2008's endgame was the deciding factor in some matches, but didn't have as much impact as 2007 or 2009. 2006's endgame was somewhere in between, though many teams incorporated it into the way they scored to begin with...so it then was no longer an isolated 'endgame' strategy like 2007 was or 2009 will be, which rules it out. None of the three years had direct and, consistent human player scoring so it's difficult to gauge where that plays into statistics.
While I agree that 2007's exponential scoring and where you placed ringers had more effects than quantity of ringers, I could still argue that 2007's scoring is more directly related to 2009's than any other because 2009 has similar potential for spikes in scoring. For dumper bots, the scores spike relative to the maximum score just as much as placing ringers in a row did
in a typical match -- remember, in 2007 rows of 6 or more were fairly rare. However, my point was more to the fact that 2007's game strategies were more inlined with 2009's spectrum of strategies: on one end you are a bot who can score the game piece magnificently, and on the other you are a defensive bot who's primary strategy is to hold out for the endgame. <G14> makes the latter less attractive as a primary strategy for a game like Lunacy or Rack 'N Roll, and I believe we would immediately see that if <G14>'s implications were put into effect for 2007 rather than 2008/2006. Though I don't want to do that much work, and neither does anyone else I don't think.