alleryn wrote:Ignoring shields, wouldn't Sum(Attack)*Sum(Structure) be a better approximation of military might than Sum(Attack*Structure)?... It seems like this statistic is currently undervaluing large stacks of weak ships.
The current statistic is more of an assessment of the force an empire can distribute across its territory; it does undervalue all stacks. Coding it up in the way you suggest could be valid for considering the forces as a single stack, and would be useful for the purpose of assessing what is the max combat value an empire could have defending a single planet, like their home planet, but I don't really think that assessment is more valuable/interesting than the current one. But you can of course change it on your machine however you prefer it, or simply add a new statistic.
What might be even more interesting, I think, would be a sum across systems of sum_attack_in_system*_sum_structure_in_system, which would be a better assessment of total strength as currently deployed. I'm not quite 100% sure that is currently possible to script up, but I am inclined to think it is. It would be important to read up on the significance of RootCandidate and LocalCandidate, and our
Scripting Details Subsection on Statistics unfortunately only gives the barest of summaries, without syntax for it, so you'd have to dig through the parser code or look for existing examples to figure out the syntax (and then a proposed revision for the above subsection would be much appreciated).
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