Re: [Rails-devel] Route and revenue calculation.

[brett l. <wak...@gm...>]

On 7/10/06, ia...@co... <ia...@co...> wrote:

> An interesting point to note is that the 'best' answer with split train types is not clear: consider having a train which pays some money straight to treasury and some to the 'dividend pool', and a second which pays only to the 'dividend pool'. For any given possible level of straight-to-treasury payment there will be a maximum dividend-pool payment, and vice-versa. However which combination to take is a tactical choice by the player. E.g. the treasury payment might be one of {$30, $40, $60} with concommitant dividend contributions of {$150, $120, $110}. The {$40/$120} option may be what the company director wants, and he should be allowed to select it.
>
>


Perhaps we should approach this in two stages:

1. Legal route calculation.   We should allow the user to select their
desired route, and only provide information about the legality of the
route. Here, we could potentially re-use our current hex-selection
mechanism to allow users to select the hexes involved in their desired
route. Then, we can do the calculations involved in finding the value
of the designated route.

2. Best route calculation. As a user-configurable option, we should
allow toggling between user-selected routes and computer-decided
"best" routes. In the case where a tactical decision needs to be made,
we should simply offer a selection of the highest value routes in each
category or fall back to user-selected routing.

I think that #1 is around 80% of the work we need to do. Once we've
got that done, handling #2 might have a more clear path.

---Brett.