Ramming Movement

Ramming Movement is a form of aggressive movement with the goal of ramming your bot into the enemy.

Ramming as a movement

These bots use Ramming Movement exclusively. They are called rambots or rammers.

Although rambots tend not to perform very well in overall ranking, it is difficult for even the best bots to get more than a 75% score share against a good rammer.

Most rambots fire bullets (typically with HOT, Linear, Circular, or other such simple guns) in addition to ramming. This is because ramming without firing is dangerous, and even in the best-case scenario (against SittingDuck or equivalent) leads to the rambot becoming disabled.

Rambots are ranked in the Rambot Challenge 2K6 (Results). The current state-of-art rammer is MaxRisk.

Ramming as a fatality

Some bots use ramming only against disabled opponents (which cannot move) and/or low-energy opponents (which typically tend to stop firing). Since ram damage gives twice as many score points as bullet damage, and ram kills give a larger bonus than bullet kills, ramming can be an effective finishing move.

Some endgame rammers do not have explicit ramming code, but fatality-ram as a side-effect of their Minimum Risk Movement or Anti-Gravity Movement implementation.

Risks of ramming as a fatality:

• You get twice the bonus but the difference can be extremely little if the original bonus is less than ten.
• You risk not killing the opponent.
• The opponent can gain some more bullet damage while you cannot.
• The inactivity timer might get activated.

Recommended precautions:

• Wait until the last bullet fired at you has passed your position before starting to ram.
• If ramming does not succeed within 300 ticks, start firing again to prevent you from losing the normal bonus.
• Whenever you detect an enemy bullet has been fired, you should abort the ram, evade the bullet, and start firing again.

Ram damage and scoring

When two robots collide, both bots take a constant 0.6 damage.

When the battle finishes, each bot scores 2 points for each point of damage they cause by ramming enemies. In addition, if an enemy is killed by ramming, the rammer receives 30% of all the damage it did to that enemy as a bonus.

A rambot that does not fire bullets, against a perfectly immobile opponent, would yield the following result:

However, as mentioned above, most rambots fire bullets. So the scores usually look more like this:

Future developments

As of 2017, the current best rambots are MicroBots and NanoBots. No one has yet created a rammer that uses advanced movement or targeting techniques, such as Wave Surfing or GuessFactor Targeting. There is a great deal of potential in this area.

See also

• List of rambots
• Rambot Challenge 2K6
• Robocode scoring
• Robocode physics

Movement Melee Corner · Anti-Gravity · Minimum Risk 1v1 Wave Surfing · Random · Stop And Go · Ramming · Oscillator · Mirror General Distancing · Wall Avoidance · Dodging Bullets · Musashi Trick · Multi-Mode Related Movement Challenges · Movement Profile · Precise Prediction · Energy Drop