Fixing Best-in-Slot calculators

From Fallen London Wiki

I wanted to start the long-awaiting task of fixing the Best-in-Slot calculators (BiS) to properly take into account Ambition rewards. It turns out to be somewhat trickier than I would have liked, given the possible combinations of mutually-exclusive items.

So right now I see two challenges:

  1. Find a decent algorithm to calculate the actual BiS in all such mutually-exclusive cases.
  2. Decide how we even want to present the data in case there are multiple item combinations which produce the "Best" value for a quality.

To give an example of the 2nd issue, have a look at Persuasive Items when you toggle the calculator with both "Faction" and "Profession" to be "Yes" (and everything else "No"). This combination of restrictions produces two different ways to get to the max Persuasive bonus: One with a +12 Profession Hat and and +10 Faction Weapon, and the other with a +10 "regular" Hat and a +12 Profession Weapon.

The current code knows to handle this case when the multiple options come due to purely profession items (I wrote that code before any Ambition was completed) but I must admit I don't like very much the way it's currently shown. But now thinking about adding to this more mutually exclusive combinations (due to many Ambition reward items) it's quite possible we'll run onto more cases in which there's more than one item combination which produces the "max".

I'd appreciate feedback and a discussion on how we'd even like this to look before trying to plan how to actually code it.