Traditional spreadsheets make you pick materials by hand and hope for the best. That is not optimization; that is guessing with a safety net. When a player like Draedon_Is_Life asks how to maximize Value per Ore across multiple factories, they run straight into the hard wall that Excel and its Solver were never designed for this kind of dynamic, toggleable decision-making. Our view is clear: the problem isn't the math, it's the tool.
The core challenge here is elegant in its simplicity. You have a set of materials, each with a Value and an Ore cost, and you want the combination that yields the best ratio. Manual selection works for small sets, but Draedon_Is_Life correctly identifies the scaling limit: brute force becomes unreasonable beyond a handful of factories. The Simplex approach is the right instinct, but traditional spreadsheet solvers struggle with ratio objectives and dropdown toggles. You end up building binary matrices and hoping the solver converges. That is work *around* the spreadsheet, not work *with* it.
What this story reveals is a demand for a fundamentally different workflow. Users should not have to translate a natural optimization question into a fragile matrix of binary constraints. They should be able to say "maximize Value per Ore using these materials" and have the tool handle the combinatorial logic, including which materials are active or inactive. That is not a feature request; it is a necessity for anyone managing production chains, supply ratios, or any system where the best combination changes as inputs do.
The practical takeaway is this: if you are spending time building workarounds for selection logic that your spreadsheet cannot natively support, you are not optimizing your materials, you are optimizing your spreadsheet skills. The real progress comes when the tool understands the goal, not just the formula. Draedon_Is_Life has asked the exact right question; the answer is not a better macro, but a smarter, more intuitive way to explore and solve for the best ratio across any number of toggles.