Testbed

User:Xor recently brought a discussion about building a good testbed in 1v1 which had a big impact on the way I build my 1v1 tests.

Now I question the same about melee. I build like three different beds after each minor release in RR:

• 5 HOF
• 2x (1 bot I lose against, 1 DrBob, 2 bots I score less than 60% and the rest is random)

This was a very simple strategy that I use until today and that rarely helps me distinguish the difference between two adjacent versions. Now I feel like I have to step up on this matter instead of releasing a bunch of versions everyday to evaluate it against the whole population.

Do you guys have any strategy to build melee testbeds that are worth sharing?

I usually use a mix of the top nano bots (because they let me run battles faster).

My usual test bed doesn't contain a single robot more than once. A diverse test bed seems to be better. If you really want to focus on a certain task, e.g. dodging HOT bullets, I can also recommend running battles in a 800x800 battlefield with 3 HOFs. This simulates the "middle game" where the weak bots are already dead and you have to fight to get into the 1vs1 stage.

My standard test bed looks like this: 1000x1000 HOF, DustBunny, Infinity, DoctorBob, Wallaby, KomoriNinja, Lib. This collection covers 80% of all melee movement and targeting styles. Sometimes I include SittingDroid to see whether I can fire at him fast enough. Sometimes adding a rammer is interesting too. I can also recommend testing a simple bed with nano and micro bots, and afterwards testing the same bed but replacing one of them by a top melee bot to see how your bot compares to that one.

I used to test with a 4x HOF, 3x Shiz, 1x DoctorBob, 1x GrubbmOne and a top bot eg Portia. This worked well for developing initial surfing, but I am running into limitations so now I am making efforts to run battles against the bots I have a negative KNNPBI for. However that didn't give me any gain in score, the only thing that helped was better features and fixing bugs ;-)