APM=Skill -- A Monte-Carlo Simulation

SC2 is analogous to so many real-life problems. If you want to understand real-life, you need to study SC2. IF you look at how economics play out in the late game of SC2, minerals and gas become worth less and less to the point they are almost worthless. What becomes valuable are things that can affect tens of thousands of resources, such as map control. So late game economies always scale towards map control. Eventually the world economy will be overrun with every product imaginable, every person will be so rich he can buy anything he wants. It’s identical.

You can also make comparisons between how armies engage in free market transactions. If you want something that someone else has, and you go and take it, there is a price to pay that far exceeds the value of the object. So you have to negotiate what you are willing to give up in exchange for the thing you want. It’s the same when medivacs are harassing the zerg. He wants to get some value. He wants to deny creep. He wants to kill queens. The zerg wants to push his creep out and secure his bases. So the zerg is willing to give up zerglings in exchange for control of the map allowing his bases to go up and his creep to spread. It’s literally identical. You can treat free market transactions as a form of combat. You negotiate what you are willing to give up every time you choose to fight or to not fight. Fights happen when both players agree it’s a fair trade but it never is so whoever is slightly better at guessing their advantage will get the advantage in the trade.

You can draw comparisons between the systems of SC2 and how they are so ludicrously complex that they are effectively a blackbox system. You can never understand how the entire system and all its internals work, but you can feed inputs into the system and generate correlations between those inputs and the outputs. That’s exactly how complex societal mechanisms like the FBI works. Nobody knows how the FBI, in its entirety, works. Nobody knows how the stock market works. Nobody knows how the economy works. These are all examples of blackboxes just like SC2.