another "does it make sense to...?" question

I've currently got the bot tracking nicely, and have worked out how to collect and store as much data as I can get from the scanner (x,y,heading,velocity,energy). I know I can also get distance, but if I've understood Pattern Matching correctly I have no real need to store the distance to the bot at the time of scanning.

Anyway, does it make sense to do this for my fire power?

onBulletHit(BulletHitEvent e) {
  increaseFirePower();
}
onBulletMissed(BulletMissedEvent e) {
  decreaseFirePower();
}

My motivation is that the bot should conserve energy if it keeps missing, but ramp up the firepower as it scores consecutive hits. Increase and Decrease functions can be pretty much anything (I've currently got them behaving linearly, but there's probably a more optimal equation for the increase/decrease functions).

I think this function is moderately better than simply firing 3.0 all the time, but I haven't looked into the alternatives used by other bots. I'm probably doing a lot of wheel reinvention, but hopefully that's to be expected from a newbie bot author, heh. *wipes sweat from brow*

Yes, it does make sense, although mostly it is dependent on hitrate instead of hit/miss. The are some more things to keep in mind regarding bulletpower. First of all, heavier bullets travel slower. Next to that, you do not want to disable yourself, you'll be a Sitting Duck with 0.0 energy. You can choose your bulletpower depending on distance, when you are close, fire full power as the chance of hitting is bigger. There has been grown a consensus to have the default bulletpower somewhere between 1.7 and 2.4, mostly due to a (theoretical) discussion years ago (somewhere on the old wiki). This number would be an optimum to minimize the energyloss while still be able to punch hard enough. The best way is to pick an opponent and try different (extreme?) powerschemes, so you can see what is happening and come up with something you like. And it gives much more satisfaction that you create by yourself even out of ideas of others, than just to copy some things from others you don't understand.

That makes some sense to me, too, though I'd also advise experimenting with different schemes to find out what works best.

I think everyone has to find their own balance of reinventing wheels and learning from other bots and the wiki. There are lots of trade-offs either way. But yes, certainly some of that is expected. =)