Effectiveness

I tried using area-normalisation a while ago on my VCS bins, and it consistently gave worse results than height-normalisation. I've got no idea why, but I might give it another shot and separate out the 'future danger' from the 'wave danger' like you said. After all, it does make more sense statistically, but if there's one thing Robocode has taught me, often 'statistically correct' doesn't work as well as some tweaked variant =)

Mm... indeed "statistically correct" often doesn't work as well... though in my view in all of those cases, there's probably a way to get the same gains without compromising statistical correctness. It's just a matter of finding out precisely why the "statistically incorrect" version worked better, which can be quite non-trivial.