?????

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 do disagree slightly with that first point. RougeDC's gun system, which is primarily k-nn precise intersection targeting, did benefit slightly from the inclusion of a "Single Tick" PM targeting system. Switching between it and the main targeting system seems to pay off slightly against some surfers the targeting would otherwise have more trouble with. In general though, I do agree that simple guns in a virtual gun system won't gain all that much.

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...

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.