Talk:The Gauntlet (Season 7)/@comment-27554970-20160803011355

Summary:

For those of us not trying to win the car in one run, I've been trying out the strategy of intentionally losing the race after a hard boss race, just so don't waste more races getting to and racing a boss I'm not likely to win against anyway. So I did some quick calculations...

In general, if you can't beat the next boss 2/3rds of the time, it is better to lose the first race after the current boss and start a new run. If the next boss is boss 3 or 4, you really want to beat that boss 3/4ths of the time in order to make it worthwhile going on.

Details:

Here's how I calculated this. I'm going to use a simple example to keep the math easier.

If you just repeat winning the first 3 races (through Boss 1) and then always lose the 4th race, you will bank 8,260 points every four races, which is 2,065 a race.

Now, if you beat Boss 2 most of the time (3/4ths, say), and then lose the next race (race 7), you will make 17,030 points out of 7 races, which is 2,433 a race. However, if you sometimes lose to boss 2 (race 6), you only make 8,260 points for 6 races, which is just 1,377 a race. So, 3/4 times 2,433 and 1/4 times 1,377 gives you 2,169 a race, which is better then the 2,065 a race you get by losing race 4 every time.

However, if you only beat Boss 2 half the time, then you would only get 1/2 times 2433 + 1/2 times 1,377 which would be 1,905 per race, which is worse than the 2,065 a race you would get by losing race 4 every time.

What do you think? There are a few simplifying assumptions here (like that you can always win the non-boss races, but that seems to be more or less the case), and that, if you can't win the next boss more than 2/3rds of the time, the boss after that can be rarely won. But I doubt any of that will change the numbers that much (of course, I could be wrong).