I misremembered the May 6 date as May 9 but luckily other people have been asking for more time so it seems I might not be late.
The average number of soldiers the Army sends looks linear in the number of aliens. A linear regression gives the coefficients: 0.40 soldiers by default + 0.66 per Abomination + 0.32 per Crawler + 0.16 per Scarab + 0.81 per Tyrant + 0.49 per Venompede. From here, the log-odds of victory looks like a linear function of the difference between the actual number of soldiers and the expected number of soldiers.
Based on no evidence at all, I will assume this generalizes to the individual weapon types and that each additional soldier of each weapon type increases the odds of victory by some fixed amount depending on the composition of the aliens, but not dependent on the other soldiers already present.
Here’s a guess that can definitely be improved upon but I don’t know if I will
7 Thermo-Torpedos
It’s definitely wrong because
Weapon diversity clearly helps but my model makes that impossible. I’m pretty sure my assumption that the effectiveness of each marginal soldier is the same and only depends on the aliens is wrong, even though it does look true when averaged over all weapon and alien types.
I’m not surprised my submission did badly since it was the easiest thing I could quickly come up with after seeing that I was already late. I wasn’t quite expecting to be unable to come up with anything better though. After looking at other people’s comments I’m particularly disappointed that it never once crossed my mind to try analyzing single-soldier combats. I was explicitly trying to figure out the effect of one soldier of each weapon, and I had a histogram of the number of soldiers per combat from which I could have easily gleaned that there were lots of single-soldier combats to investigate had I thought to do so, but instead I tried to analyze the win rates of (some combination of weapons) vs (some combination of weapons) + (1 more of the weapon I’m trying to investigate) and running into trouble with the fact that that extra soldier is also correlated with an increased alien threat and didn’t know how to tease the two effects apart.