ACTUV Scoring Structure

[TerminatorSub]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

Well, I think I've pretty much done as well as I'm going to do on all of these (except Gator, I've only played it once and I'm not going back). And it's left me a bit disappointed with the scoring structure.

As was pointed out earlier in this thread, the points given for maintaining contact on both HF and MF are so high in comparison to the fuel and pinging penalties that the decision-making "flowchart" is very straightforward. If you don't have contact on both sensors, getting contact is always your highest priority (other than avoiding proximity to surface traffic), so you never need to concern yourself with speed settings or MF sonar use until you have continuous contact on both sensors. From a gaming point of view, the lack of tradeoffs make it rather uninteresting. From a tactical research point of view, it makes me wonder what DARPA needs us for.... why use crowdsourcing to discover "optimal" tactics when the optimal approach is so obvious?

You are an expert. I think they also look for newbies like me to add noise to the results.

I Googled some info on optimal submarine search patterns and chose the following papers:

faculty.nps.edu/awashburn/docs/MORV6N4.pdf
c3uv.berkeley.edu/papers/Mcgee_acc06.pdf
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/levy-flight/

It seems the choices to sweep an area are spiral in, zig-zag, or random. I tried these different approaches.

In trailing the target, one can be aggressive (perhaps too much) or lay back a bit. In some of the platforms and scenarios, it is hard to get close enough to acquire a HF lock. That blind spot in the Triton that you mentioned in another post, and the speed limited HF in some cases are factors.

Theory is only good for 5 minutes. Different players will react to the sub throwing decoys and the surface vessel attack in unique ways.

I am wondering if the score results will be analyzed with statistics, or if they will look at each result for fastest target acquisition, closest approach of the surface attack vessel, and shortest time out of contact with the SSK while avoiding said surface attacker?

I also wonder if there will be a second version with more scenarios. The SSK hasn't thrown a torpedo yet, but one should be expected.