Read part one here: Unleash the Geek – day I
Unleash The Geek Series
After reaching Silver League today I focused on refactoring a couple critical parts of the code and implementing more advanced movements.
The way robots select a move each turn was fine for just 3 or 4 options but now it was getting messy. That was the first part of the day: clarifying preconditions for each move and defining a clear priority in case multiple moves are possible.
For example, requesting a radar is more important than collecting ore when the map is still slightly explored, but once there is plenty of ore visible, collecting it is the priority.
Second part was harder cause I focused on placing more traps and being aggressive, but that didn’t work. Most enemies never fell in my traps so I mostly wasted some time on this idea.
And that was a surprise cause the enemy cannot see your traps. Not even the items your robots carry so there is no way you can guess trap locations. But I will come back to this later.
Another idea that I thought about was trying to remove enemy radars. But once you place a radar and discover the ores in range you really don’t care about that radar anymore so why would anyone take time to remove them?
I did some minor improvements and some tracking for my own traps and reducing ore count after digging to increase accuracy but that did not help much.
Something that did help a bit was tweaking the radar placement again. Instead of placing it closer to the base I now prefer to go a bit to the right where there is a higher probability of finding ore.
But even with all the improvements I did not manage to reach top 500. Not until I added a «safe mode» to my bots that prevents them from digging where the enemy has created a hole already. I cannot see enemy traps, but if there is a hole, and I didn’t dig there, I better not try my luck.
And this was to my surprise very effective: I jumped from below 500 to top 200. Right above my expectations of reaching top 300 as I mentioned yesterday. Not sure I will be able to progress to Gold League tomorrow but I will try.
Read the third part: Unleash the Geek – day III
Buy me a Ko-fi