Interesting gun

Sounds like your gun is effectively a single tick pattern matcher, with a fixed match length of one and multiple choice?

At first I was surprised that could be effective but I suppose in melee the next state of most robots only depends on the current state (of the battlefield) so it makes some sense.

I guess in a mega bot it could be expanded to consider other elements of the battlefield state to get more accurate results?

Yes, exactly! To do multiple choice, it samples the next tick at (weighted) random rather than picking the most frequent one as in classic single tick. Definitely using more input features could help, but I think velocity/deltaHeading/acceleration are the most important features and the play-it-forward sort of implicitly captures wall features by rejecting movement trajectories that go out of bounds.