Randomized surfing

I've played around a fair bit with adding random factors to my surfing. (Very, very carefully - you don't want to sacrifice super effective bullet dodging vs weaker guns.) It seems like there has to be something there! But I never got it to outperform my non-randomized version. Will be cool to see what you come up with.

Edit: Might be more accurate to say I've played with adding it to my Flattener.

Yeah, my attempts always did worse as well.

I still feel like there's more potential for randomness in surfing than has been seen in use to-date. Specifically, I have plans I've yet to try regarding what I'd call an "obsucated goto" movement to be used as part of surfing. Despite efforts I've heard of thus far being unsuccessful I have a feeling that against the strongest targeting systems out there, a well-designed "pure random" movement with "obfuscated goto paths" (important!) might at least perform around the same as surfing/flattening systems.

Well, none of my efforts have been seen in use because I didn't release any of them. :-) But I've tinkered quite a bit, so it's not for lack of trying.

The idea I thought had the most promise involved generating a completely new/random movement profile every time you get hit. Also tried instead/also a new profile every X ticks, or every time a wave passes, or modeling those random stats in a fair number different distributions (flat with flat juice to super spiky), and in various mixes of random + normal flattener. I guess it's possible some of those would've helped against certain bots, but my testing on this is usually restricted to 2-3 strong bots, since the only improvement I'd really care about is beating DrussGT without sacrificing too much vs Shadow/XanderCat. ;)