Interesting metric, though a bit cumbersome to manage properly. Not being able to easily reorder and sort the solutions in game is a bit frustrating. I wonder if there'll be any ties this round. Initially I wouldn't have thought so, but the more I played with it the more likely it seems. It might be interesting to limit the number of solutions one could submit (eg: pareto front of your best 4 solutions)? Or maybe that would just lead to more ties?

I ended up spending most time playing with the 1 and 2 arm solutions, those seemed the most important to shave as much as possible. I guess that triangle tracks don't add much value for this problem, so I didn't test any odd cost solutions until I got down to Period 6. Maybe there's some combinations where it makes a difference, but I guess not. Feels like it's almost always more efficient to add arms rather than anything else, you can just do more stuff in the same time. Interesting metric this one!