?????

For what it's worth, adding simple guns to a virtual gun system which has a dynamic clustering, precise intersection gun is not going to give you any more points. The only thing which might help is a circular gun, and even then just against SpinBot.

If you design your algorithm taking speed into account to begin with, it shouldn't be a problem. Be careful of nested loops, and use FastTrig and you should be fine. The biggest speed increases for me came when I figured out ways I could keep a value for later, instead of re-calculating it, particularly things like square roots (distances) and KNN results from Dynamic Clustering. If you can eliminate whole branches of code from being re-executed it can also be a major time-saver, such as exiting a search early if you know that all points from here on will be infeasible.

I wouldn't exactly term a Single-Tick PM gun as 'simple' ;-) I was more thinking along the line of HOT, linear, circular, random linear and averaged linear. Single-Tick is still something I need to play with... possibly Single-Tick KNN?

Well... my current opinion is that the single-tick thing just wastes way too much CPU to be worth it. Maybe it would be worth trying a similar concept with a larger fixed number of ticks though... like predicting forward in 10-tick intervals...

The simple targeter I really wanted most was a dead-stop.. where would the bot end up if it stopped as soon as it saw the wave, using deceleration, etc.

I've even pondered making dead-stop the 0.0 center of my guess factors instead of HOT, in which case the separate dead-stop targeter becomes superfluous. Wasn't sure if it'd yield anything significant, but it bugs me that 1.0 and -1.0 have a precise physical/decision meaning when you do a good MEA calculation, but that 0.0 wasn't significant of any enemy decision, whereas dead-stop would be.

Random Targeting does have its uses. A pure random gun usually improves the score against very strong movement. And hurts the score against everything else.