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 =)