Feature - Rejected Add hard cap to maximizer

[Fluxxdog]

The min and max keywords do a great job for the most part, but there's a horrid scenario that breaks max right off the wall.

A bit of history into my request. I was looking for a way to allow experience and ML to work together i a way that would allow maximium experience without upping ML too much. Unfortunately, I've only come up with a way to disable using ML for experience:
"exp,-.125 ML"
This results in the ML's contribution to experience to be negated. Obviously, not the best idea, but if ML alone adds 100 ML to a fight and you can only handle 50 extra ML, you're boned.
"exp,ml 50 max" doesn't work as experience from ML is still counted separately from ML
"exp,0 ml 50 max" just mean ML won't count towards the score directly, but still count as experience
As it stand, max acts as a soft cap. Once you hit it, it's not important, but can still be added to. But if you want to truly limit something, there's nothing in maximizer to stop it.

My request is the addition of a new keyword similar to min and max that will forcibly prevent a modifier from going over the set limit. For example:
"experience,ml 40 min 50 cap" would maximize experience and ML, requiring a minimum of 40 ML, but under no circumstances would ML be over 50, regardless of other contributions to scores, returning a FAIL or false if it cannot meet those conditions.

 

[roippi]

I don't think this is possible.

Maximizer creates a "shortlist" consisting of the best item(s) for a particular slot and then does combinatorics on permutations of everything in the shortlist. In optimization, this strategy for solving the knapsack problem is known as Branch and Bound. Setting a "min" means that some of those permutations can/will fail and we discard them - this is fine.

The problem is that setting a "cap" does not jive with how the shortlist is created. We no longer are okay with sorting items for a slot and only considering the best (aka highest scoring) for our shortlist - the proper item may be right in the middle of the rankings for a slot. There's no way to know until we get to the combinatorics step - and we can't feed every item into our shortlist, that would cause things to explode. Maximizations would take minutes, hours. As things work right now, you could add a cap to the combinatorics step, but things would either trivially work if you set the cap too high or erroneously fail if the cap is such that items excluded from the shortlist would solve the constraint.

Jason or someone else well-versed in the math theory behind the maximizer can come along and correct me, but I'm going to mark this rejected for now.