Day one: Unleash the Geek – day I
Day two: Unleash the Geek – day II
Day three: Unleash the Geek – day III
Unleash The Geek Series
Last day I managed to reach top 15 on Silver, today the objective is promoting to Gold. For that I have to focus on beating the Silver Boss. How can I do that?
Well, first of all it seems that there are a couple strategies that work against players but not against the boss. For example, the hiding strategy I explained yesterday is completely useless against him. The AI is smart enough to differentiate robots that come from base (and thus can carry a trap) and robots that have dug previously (burying any trap that they were carrying) meaning that any new holes they create aren’t dangerous.
Also placing traps makes no sense cause the boss never dies to that. Again, same reason: he knows when a bot can carry a trap, you won’t trick him.
So, removing those moves actually makes my bot score better against the boss, but I drop to top 50 in the rankings. I need to collect faster and be more efficient than the boss if I want to progress. Efficiency is key to win on Silver.
Things I have done to get closer to the top 1:
- When moving towards an objective, stop one cell before: robots can dig on the cell they are currently in but also top, down, left and right cells. It is a small improvement but everything counts.
- Do the same the Boss is doing: track when enemies come directly from base so we don’t discard all the holes their robots create. Not very useful cause the AI only digs 2 holes before going back to base when placing a radar but again, everything counts.
- Place radars in a passive way: if there is a radar available in base, take it and just go collect ore. The radars will be placed in very sub optimal places but it won’t take any extra turns to do that so why not. We have to maximize the score.
- Prevent multiple bots from going to the same objective. That is, if a cell has 2 ore, allow only 2 bots to target that cell and make sure those 2 bots are also the closest ones to that cell. This is a very good improvement.
With that and a few minor tweaks the bot is much faster at collecting ore. I managed to beat the Boss consistently and thus got my promotion at the end of the day!
Now I am at rank 400 in the new League, out of 450 total so there is still quite a lot of work haha. I think it is time to get aggressive now and start doing kamikaze moves to kill as many enemy robots as possible. Maybe I will try something tomorrow.
Buy me a Ko-fi