Solution: Maximum Points After Enemy Battles

Understand how to apply greedy techniques to maximize points by strategically defeating weaker enemies and absorbing energy from stronger ones. This lesson guides you through sorting and energy management for optimal battle outcomes using a coding interview problem.

We'll cover the following...

Statement
Solution
- Time complexity
- Space complexity

Statement

You are given an integer array enemyEnergies where each element represents the energy value of an enemy, and an integer currentEnergy representing your initial energy.

You start with $0$ points, and all enemies are initially unmarked. You may perform either of the following operations any number of times to accumulate points:

Operation 1 — Choose an unmarked enemy i such that currentEnergy >= enemyEnergies[i]:

Your points increase by $1$ .
Your energy decreases: currentEnergy = currentEnergy - enemyEnergies[i].

Operation 2 — If you have at least $1$ point, choose any unmarked enemy i:

Your energy increases: currentEnergy = currentEnergy + enemyEnergies[i].
Enemy i becomes marked.

Return the maximum number of points you can achieve by performing these operations optimally.

Constraints:

$1 \leq$ enemyEnergies.length ...