Forums → Games → GemCraft CS: gem combining schemes competition

There are a couple things that are not quite right/misleading about the way you described it, though.
1) Saving the copy from one iteration to use (for the 13c) means that you can get slightly faster growth than .492. True, that's the growth over the initial grade 1 when using 1 iteration, but repeating it will raise that.
2) It can be repeated every 15.5x mana gain, you don't have to wait for a big 244x mana gain.

Anyway, I'm going to look for better methods. Hopefully I'll find some.

Started with g1, used my method to g19. Growth from g7: 0.49225
Using a new method, same grades: 0.49255.
New method's cost increase is 15.26x. It's just a modified version of my previous one .
7 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
2 = 1 + 13A
Result = 7 + 2 + 2 + (2 + 13A + (13A + 13A))

Still looking for more...

Tell me when you can beat this, at a growth of 0.5039062

Keep looking...

LOL that's cruel :P

I was going to use that combine method, but I would need 65 slots to hold gems, and scripting anything that used more than the 36 inventory slots is too much trouble. :/

Get some smaller ones, we have tons of combine:
https://github.com/gemforce-team/gemforce/tree/master/results
If you can make a script that build a generic combine I'd be very interested

Yeah, I can (did) make a bot to do my large combines for me. Hasn't been tested with lag yet and needs a few features/changes before I'll release it.

Also, I'm still working on finding ways to quickly calculate optimal gem combines. I've found that 2^x combine methods are not the best. (E.g the best combine using 500 or less is a 383c.)
(How long did it take you to calculate that combine? My current methods would take weeks, if not months.)

And, I realized that how I was calculating the number of slots required isn't really accurate. Other combining orders can do better, but I still don't think that that huge leech combine will work in 36 slots.

Suuper .. personally, I've found that the best way to handle a large combine is with a spreadsheet.

By having a spreadsheet handy, it is possible to easily do a 1024 combine upgrade. And once you've figured out how to do it by hand, if you're into that sort of thing, you can script it relatively easily.

The 1024 managem upgrade plan I've got would not require all 36 gem box slots, because it makes use of the Duplicate key, and I assemble a lot of gems by hand then add them to the gem I'm building. The same thing with the 1024 killgem upgrade - this one is even easier, as I can make most of the sub-subgems and dupe those to create the subgems to add to the gem I'm building.

A 1024 combine can be done with much fewer slots than 36, and I've used my bot for 7,000+ combines also with much fewer slots.

I'm not looking for the most practical solution that has already been found; I'm looking for even better. I enjoy a challenge.

(And as I've said, I already have a 'script' for combining. Paste combine pattern -> press a couple buttons -> watch it make quick work.)

Btw, I'm assuming that the combines that ieee just linked to are all up-to-date best known methods. Correct?

Yes, they are We are also pretty sure that they can't be done better, that means you won't invent better 1024-combine than ours becouse we just checked all possiibilities of combining 1024 same gems into one and chose best one.

You couldn't have possibly checked ALL for the higher combines, but I believe you about the pure orange being best possible. Multi-colored I haven't looked into thoroughly, but I can see a way that the same search methods might fail to find the truly ideal method. (I'll post back on this once I get around to my testing/searching.)

Orange gem combines are EXACT, unless rounding errors you CANNOT do better, no matter what algorithm you use, we REALLY checked EVERY combination till 1 million base gems.

Composite gem combines are slightly approximated (or we couldn't go over 512c), but I can guarantee that you cannot do better than 1/1000 over ours (if needed I can get exact combines till 512, if you need to check against yours).

As for 2^n combines not being the better ones it is a well known point, we use 2^n because they are easier to compare against each other.

I have all the optimal combines for orange up to 1M and managems and killgems up to 262144, if you need them to compare against yours just ask (you can find them in the gemforce-tables repo, but you need to use the gemforce programs to extract them).

I don't think you should reinvent the wheel, though, I took 2 months to build over psorek's algorithms to improve and extend them, you'll take much longer to achieve better/bigger results than gemforce ones (and, to be honest, I don't think you will succeed unless you are at least a CS graduate).

If you can find better combines than the ones we have I'll be happy to hear, if instead you are interested in building over our project we could talk about it.

Lastly, any chance to see your auto combining script?

Happy gemcrafting
12345ieee

No you didn't, there are millions of millions of millions of ways to combine 1 million gems. You may have found a way to find a proven best still, but calculating through them all isn't possible.

I'm writing in c#, do you want code or the compiled program? (Windows)
(Either way I haven't finished it yet.)

Maybe I explained it badly.
We don't compute all the 1,000,000! permutations of base gems, we keep reusing the results computed in the previous steps to compute only the needed gems (this was the great idea of psorek) and only compute the ones that can actually be useful, but the algorithm is still 100% exact and runs in O(n^2*log(n)) (the leech one, the composite ones are a bit slower, but can be easily made exact).

You can see it yourself, it's released open source at https://github.com/gemforce-team/gemforce

As for yours, I'd be very interested in it anyway, but I'd really like to have the source code so I can understand it and tinker with it (I know some C#, not like C but well enough).

Suuper, a single gem type is a much easier problem than multiple types, your posited trillion possibilities (actually much larger, but a trillion is no big deal to a comp anyway) have tons of degenerate solutions that give identical results.

You can further limit the solutions of interest with the combining formulas, grades (n+1)+n being the biggest bump, you just have to optimize for getting those best combinations as many times as possible (again easier for pure orange since the only thing of interest is the special).

Of course there's some contention in the starting assumptions for how to construct the most effective killing/mana gain platform (which has some variability), things vary. For example if your goal is to finish endurance vs maximize xp, you'll build very different things to do that, at least there isn't a gem spec/combine that'll do all that yet