Hitting Pure Flattened Movement?

A few thoughts. First, yes, the difference is one uses bullet hits and the other uses visits to update its stats. If you're hitting the enemy at all consistently, this is more a difference of granularity than of rate of decay. Is there a general correlation of bullet dodging/flattener to decay rate, like flatteners decay faster? Maybe, but that seems like a guess for now.

Against most surfers, my non-decaying gun is actually the strongest gun I have. I guess those surfers have enough exploitable weaknesses unrelated to their surf stats to outweigh what I can gain from a fast decay rate. As a result, I really only tune the Anti-Surfer gun against the very strongest bots - some subset of DrussGT, Shadow, Tomcat, and XanderCat. My Anti-Surfer gun decays based on visits, not bullet hits, which it actually knows nothing about. So in terms of the metric, it's more like a flattener. I guess it probably is more tuned as an anti-flattener than anti-bullet dodger.

And you could look at it another way. Diamond and DrussGT's main guns are pretty much the strongest guns in existence. Against most bots, they crush the Anti-Surfer guns. The fact the Anti-Surfer guns can compete at all in that matchup is notable. And DrussGT is an insanely hard bot to hit - I wouldn't be shocked if both of my guns perform about as well as Random Targeting at certain points in the match.

I've been experimenting with an anti surfer gun which decays on shots and on hits/ bullethitbullets , its working reasonably well vs top bots with flatteners disabled. (Not good enough yet though...) I am suprised the anti surfer gun isn't used vs most surfers, but then again I've only been doing tests vs DrussGT, Diamond, and other high ranking bots... The difference I see is that a pure flattening bot would change its profile every wave, while a pure surfing bot would have the same profile until hit.