Progress

The new versions of NeophytePattern and NeophyteSRAL are up and in the rumble.
Managed to advance Pattern a couple of spots, which is about what I was expecting from my own tests, but the SRAL changes are working surprisingly well. It has risen quite a distance and is now around 8 or 9. It will be interesting to see where it settles down.
[edit] whoops, dropped down to 10. Oh well, still a slight improvement.

I have found a few useful changes to make to PRAL, so hope to have those updates done soon.
[edit] The new PRAL is now up. It looks strong in my testing. I hope the improvements pan out in real competition.
Actually PRAL is my baby, it was one of the first decent ideas I had and I was always disappointed it didn't do better. I found a substantial change and a few tunings to make. This time it might even pass the new and improved version of SRAL :)

Wow, NeophytePattern just took the PWIN throne from Fuatisha! Very nice!

Cool, nice that my updates were good for a place or two, though no chance of catching yatagan or LBB without stealing all their ideas, in which case they would be the same bot, so I'll have to be content where I am unless I get some serious divine inspiration happening.

Actually I am very impressed with Sabreur (and also caligula). Way back I noted I had problems with SledgeHammer and other rambots. Sabreur has very strong movement and quite close range. Anything that its linear gun and luck can't hit eventually gets rammed into a draw. Amazing how highly that simple logic can place when its movement is good enough.

NeophytePRAL seems to have stabilised at 7th, which I am very happy with. I think it is the highest ranked nano that does not use a pattern gun or ramming. Ironicly now I have re-analysed/corrected/improved the gun logic in SRAL and PRAL it is now evident (doh! supprised I managed not to realise for years) that they are actually very similar and use different mechanisms to achieve a similar result. Cousins indeed.

I can't take too much credit for the success of Sabreur's strategy, because that was definitely taken from Caligula. Although I made several tactical improvements made evident by the almost 1.7% difference between their scores. :) I even made room for colors, making it the highest ranking nano with colors.

It's actually an interesting story. The first version of Sabreur was, strategically, a lot like Bicephal, in that it used Stop and Go followed by ramming movement, and linear and HOT targeting. Basically, it would switch randomly between HOT and LT while in SAG mode, but only use LT when it was ramming. Despite sounding cool, this strategy only got it to 9th place. So the next day I took Caligula's code, shrank it by about 50 bytes, made it much more aggressive, improved mode selection and energy management, and added colors. And after one more tweak, I got it to where it is today. Sabreur 1.0 is still somewhere on the repository, if you care.

Getting to 7th place with averaged linear is quite an accomplishment, even if your movement isn't that original.