Well, that's interesting
My 'strategy' is to get out of the way and shoot from far, far away with peas fired by close-range gun. #12 in survival and that is the only positive thing ;-) I think most better bots have some sort of 'prey on the weak' strategy, firing at disabled bots and on bots with very little energy. I have the feeling that Gigarumble shows the distiction between bots with a fairly good movement/energyefficiency and a simple gun, and the ones with maybe a bit lesser movement, but a sophisticated gun. Ergo: the movement brings you in the top-30, the gun into top-10 of Gigarumble.
May be we can generalize and say that most of the bot have very weak motion algorithm, i.e. they do not dodge even a circular gun. Older version of EvBot got to the top 30 melee only using circular gun with reasonably good dodging motions.
I still remember my shock of this discovery: circular gun is good enough.
The circular gun though completely inadequate in 1on1 to get anywhere high.
The top bots authors are usually on top in both 1on1 and melee, so they can evade such simple gun, and then they still dominate top position.
So I think it is not preying on a weak, it is more of not able to hit a strong one.
In general melee the chance of meeting the top bot is quite small, so you score on others and simply yield to the best.
I'd disagree with "the movement brings you in the top-30, the gun into top-10 of Gigarumble".
I'd say targeting plays a huge role in getting into the top-30. A few of us with high ranking melee bots currently, started out developing our melee targeting using the movement from HawkOnFire. Between GlacialHawk and the current version of Glacier, I only managed to improve the movement by 1 APS worth, and well... HawkOnFire ranks 47 places below Glacier currently.
(1: Granted, HawkOnFire's movement is exceptionally well-tuned for a relatively simple low-codesize movement)
(2: Also, I'm pretty sure the 5 bots ranked higher than Glacier in the main MeleeRumble mostly outrank Glacier on the the basis of movement, rather than targeting)