Solution to the guard area distribution problem

The problem

Guard areas have the problem that they share one common gradient per team. This results in all the warriors going to the closest area ignoring the distant ones.

A possible solution

In order to get a more even distribution but at the same time keep the extra gradient count low, the guard area gradient should be split up into several guard region gradients. One for each connected patch of guard areas. Each such region would need to get some attributes such as:

• count of warriors assigned
• size
• saturation = count of warriors assigned / size

warriors could take the saturation into account when picking a gradient.

Difficulties

Of course it will be non-trivial to optimize distances so that east-warriors don't get assigned to west-regions while west-warriors walk to the east-regions and at the same time guarantee distant regions to get saturated.

Another problem would be the number of extra gradients if players paint small spots of blue along their defence line.

Conclusion

Stupidly long paths through simply picking the least saturated region in range would still be better than what we have now in b4. Going for the above approach would be a first step to turn the so called guard areas into actual guard areas.