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[JoshuaFH]

I've gotten into Helldivers 2. It has these things called stratagems which are air strikes and stuff you can call down. To do that you need to input a combination of up, down, left, and right. There are something like 20 or 30 stratagems in the game, but it occurred to me that the devs have a serious developmental problem: there's only so many unique combinations you can have without any of them overlapping. The stratagems cannot overlap, or players won't be able to bring both at the same time. It seems like a math problem, but I have no clue how I'd even get started on it, and considering my post on the Helldivers 2 Reddit got instantly deleted for being a "trivial question" I'm not sure who else I'd bring the question to but here.

Not important, just really curious.

[bloop_bleep]

If you have no limit on how many inputs are required for a strategem you can make it so you never run out of combinations. If you have a limited number of inputs you can figure out the maximum number of unique combinations: it's 4 to the power of the number of inputs.

By the way, a correspondence between combinations of characters and items you want to convey such that no combination is a prefix of another is called a Huffman encoding. There is a way to make such an assignment based on how often you use each item to minimize the average number of characters used to describe items.

[Ulfarr]

The closest analog I can think are the codons (genetic code) where you have four "bases" A, G, C, U (for dna) and they are combined in groups of 3, resulting in 64 different combinations (4^3 = 64).

In a similar vein if the helldivers startegems use groups of four then there are already 4^4=256 different combinations. I guess that should be more than enough for the entire game.

[JoshuaFH]

If you have no limit on how many inputs are required for a strategem you can make it so you never run out of combinations. If you have a limited number of inputs you can figure out the maximum number of unique combinations: it's 4 to the power of the number of inputs.

By the way, a correspondence between combinations of characters and items you want to convey such that no combination is a prefix of another is called a Huffman encoding. There is a way to make such an assignment based on how often you use each item to minimize the average number of characters used to describe items.

There is a limit. (Sorry to get back to this so much later). For most stratagems, that's 6. And the minimum seems to be 3. I'm not sure how to go about this huffman encoding, but googling it, it seems to be a method of compression?