Marshmallow/CowboyGuns

In an attempt to trick the opponents bullet dodging statistics Marshmallow every other time fires one weak bullet to the left of the enemy followed by a weak shot to the right. Then comes a max-powered bullet fired by its current "best" gun. It seems to work quite well against many top bots, though it also seems to reslt in a lower score. I haven't decided yet if I want to keep the cowboy guns or not... -- PEZ

Since I would define "works quite well" as "results in a higher score", this seems contradictory... :-P --David Alves

Yes, a contradiction in terms almost. But from a survivalistic point of view it results in better ranking. There should be a way to query out the basic ranking rules, then I could throw those cowboy guns in when it was a matter of survival. -- PEZ

An interesting thing about these Cowboy guns is that at times you can see them hit your own bullets. The versions of Marshmallow that had these guns seemed to joke with the enemy at times. The split second before a power 3 bullet would hit the enemy a Cowboy bullet would save the enemy from harm. Quite fun to watch. -- PEZ

I would attribute the higher survival rate and lower score to firing lower power bullets at all, and not truly any kind of strategy in firing them. If you spend half of your time firing 0.1-powered bullets, you'll almost always get exactly that -- better survival, worse score. --nano

Boring! =) Well, certainly that's true, but those versions of M couldn't get better survival by just fireing say power 2 instead of power 3 bullets. But when less and less bots in the top20 used active dodging the strategy behind these guns was kind of pointless. That's one of the reasons I stopped using them. The main reason was that the code got messy when I tried to filter the statistics from the results of the cowboy guns. I still think this could be a working strategy. Though maybe it needs a minibot for proof of concept. Hmmmm. BillyTheKid?, is that name free for taking? =) -- PEZ