Survival and the PL

It seems that lower bullet power is a real boost against upper bots... methinks some sort of adaptive bullet power really is the way to go.

That would make sense, as most of the time only the strongest bots get to the endgame. I wonder if it would help even more if you only shoot 0.1 against everybody in the endgame...

I have tried to shoot 0.1 only, but it didn't work very well, because if you have less energy than the other bot it is most likely that you lose anyway. But you give the other bot the chance to collect more bullet damage. If you have a weak opponent you have a good chance to hit him and get on some point more energy and a good chance to win, and if it is a strong bot you deny him the additional bullet damage.

I had played with the energy slope to detect when he might be at zero and adjusted my bullet power to this value. The energy slope was quite nice to react on bullet hits and other energy losses and worked very well but it turned out that you have to react on some battle situations where it is better to shoot normal otherwise the opponent get to much bullet score.

Yeah, what a pleasant surprise - I was going for APS. =) This was a .09 improvement over 3000 battles (6 seasons x 500 bots) in tests, so I was sure it would translate to the rumble. But I guess it really did hurt against th really weak bots I excluded from this test bed, which surprises me.

A few weeks ago I tried to find some really scientific bullet power selection. My thinking was that in general, if survival is not a worry, you want to maximize bullet damage - do as much damage as fast as possible, to increase your bulle damage and give him the least amount of time to get his own. But if survival is a concern, you want to maximize energy differential. So I plugged all this in to my normalized hit rates, expected rate of return for both of those, and trying to figure out when to switch between them.

Turns out maximizing bullet damage = 3.0, maximizing energy differential = 0.1, in almost every situation against almost every bot. Like you're literally best off just not firing to maximize energy differential unless your accuracy is super high. It didn't work very well. I think ~2.0 works because it's only slightly below 3.0 in damage rate, while also much better in hedging over more shots for consistent survival, and gun accuracy is better if you stick to a more consistent bullet power in data collection. But I'm not really sure. I'd still like something more intelligent than a hand crafted formula, but for now I'm skeptical about really making that work.

I think the thing to remember is that you don't have to maximize energy difference once you're certain you'll win the battle. From that point onwards it is possible to maximize bullet damage.