Polylunar

Team Name

Polylunar

Bot Names

Luna, Phobos, Io, Europa, and Charon. All of them are the same except color however.

Author

Rednaxela

What's special about it?

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?

[here]

How competitive is it?

Well, we'll see ;-)

How does it move?

The team members team up into tag-teams to gang up on enemies like LunarTwins. Unpaired team members move with a very simple AntiGravityMovement with no randomization or bullet dodging (yet).

How does it fire?

Well, LinearTargeting/NanoLinearTargeting in effect. Something better will replace it eventually.

How does it dodge bullets?

Well, it doesn't at all. :-)

How does the melee strategy differ from one-on-one strategy?

Well, it doesn't really. Well, except that unpaired team members don't fire unless they're the only one left or are in a particularly opportune position.

How does it select a target to attack/avoid in melee?

Whichever configuration that allows the optimal creation of tag teams :-)

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Nothing at all!

Where did you get the name?

For the team name:
Well, it's tactics are derived from LunarTwins, and it works for things besides 2v2 with no limit on the numbers so... Polylunar.

For the various bot names:
I thought it would be cute to name them after various moons ;-)

Can I use your code?

Like RougeDC, I'm releasing it under the RWPCL, but I strongly advise that the best way to really fully understand algorithms is to implement them yourself... ;-)

What's next for your robot?

Plenty of things!

• Better targeting
• Better solo-behaviors
• Bulletpower selection (just does 3.0 right now)
• And whatever else comes to mind

Does it have any WhiteWhales?

Not that I know of yet :-)

What other robot(s) is it based on?

The larger part of it is from scratch, but in concept is a descendant of LunarTwins. Also a little bit of event handling code from RougeDC.

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Comments, questions, feedback:

Well then... it isn't faring quite so well on the field and I think I know why. In my earlier tests, I was using the default 800x600 field when the team RR uses a 1200x1200 field. It seems like the larger field causes Polylunar some very serious problems. The main issues seem to be:
--- Larger distances to travel mean that Polylunar is in a vulnerable situation for significantly longer and that chasing based on an enemy's current location becomes increasingly inefficient.
--- The AntiGravityMovement that's currently in use for unpaired robots often tends to cause the bot to end up moving along right against the walls. In the large field this means that it takes far too long to get into the action if it becomes required for a pairing.
--- At these larger distances, linear targeting with nothing preventing firing out of bounds is far less effective.
--- In the larger fields, the other bots tend not to be cornered so much
--- Only firing 3.0 power bullets is probably more of a problem on the larger field size.
This is a little disappointing. Hopefully I'll manage to get these problems solved...
-- Rednaxela

Well, despite the setback due to the larger field, Polylunar is not dead in the water. I've been using Valkiries as a TestBed and have made some notable improvements that I think would hold true against most if not all bots. Here's a pretty graph of the incremental improvements I've been making:

I'm too tired to write about what changes I made in each increment right now, but in each revision, I did make an improvement which is uplifting (as opposed to changes in RougeDC more often than not degrading performance). Between the first (red) and last (orange) the difference is certainly notable. I think I'll make a 1.1 release soon based on the improvements, but first I want to get the missing battles in the rumble filled in. -- Rednaxela