Hi all,
I have the need to compute the possibilities of color mixes.
I have 5 colors: Green, Blue, Red, White and Black.
I have 3 colors per unit (Example: Green-Blue-Red).
What I want to know is: how many groups of 3 colors can I have (colors cannot repeat and order is NOT important)?
So Green-Blue-Red is the SAME as Red-Blue-Green... That should drop the number of possibilities.
Examples (these are the ones I am using):
1. Earth-Fire-Moon
2. Earth-Water-Sun
3. Water-Fire-Sun
4. Earth-Fire-Sun
5. Earth-Fire-Water
6. Earth-Sun-Moon
7. Water-Moon-Fire
8. Earth-Water-Moon
Q: Are there more combinations that I am missing?
Well your response show me that I did not use 2 combinations (I have 8).
When I started designing the game, I decided that one dominant color would have 10 units and the other 4 color would have 5 units each. So 10 + (4 x 5) = 30 units. So far, so good.
When I thought about mana and showing the mana cost on the back of cards, I concluded that there would be 3 colors per card. So I went merrily along trying to match mana groups to units. Job done... wait a minute!
Had I used 6 units of 5 colors (30 units), then I could easily use the mana groups DIRECTLY. What I mean by this is this:
-If my mana group is Earth-Water-Sun, I could choose 1 Green unit, 1 Blue unit and 1 White unit. So 3... 3 x 10 groups = 30 units.
Basically the MATH would be perfect.
Now I have some mana groups that have 5 units, 4 units and 3 units. In the 6 unit version, I would only have 3 units (for each group of cards).
Q: Should I leave the 10/20 ratio and go with more arbitrary mana choices or should I go with the math, 6 units per color and 10 mana groups?