Head on gun in melee

Folks, I have an issue which drives me crazy. How come that HawkOnFire with only head on gun have a high bullet bonus in melee? My EvBotNG is in top 20 in melee, yet when I run a simulation with HawkOnFire included, the bullet bonus it gets is just a touch higher than for Hawk's. Yes, EvBotNG survives way more often, so the survival bonus compensates.

When I try to use only the head on gun myself, my performance became even worse than the Hawk's one. I looked at the code and Hawk has only the head on gun. So HOW does it pull this miracle?

I'll have to think about it more, but off the top of my head, are you using the same bullet power? HoF uses power=3.0 a lot, which is more likely to give high bullet damage bonus. Also, if your bot's more survival oriented, it might keep more distance from opponents, which would cost you bullet damage in general.

And big congrats getting to #14 in Melee! Some very tough competition that high in the rankings.

I think you are right, the average distance must be the parameter in question. How could I forget about it.

Also, thanks for warm words with my humble progress. One thing in my mind is anti Diamond gun :) It is amazing how your bot survives with relatively short motions around a given conner in melee. I am thinking about a gun which instead of the most common GF would aim at the most visited location. I think it would score quite well against Dimond. But from the other hand, it looks like your bot is quite unique in this regard.

Do you have any recollections if this was tried in the glory days of robocode?

I don't remember anything like that. There were schemes like that for movement, I think, with different areas being considered safe/unsafe.

One thing I found helped a lot in Neuromancer was the bullet power formula, and taking distance of the target I was aiming at into account. Close targets get lots of bullet power, further targets get less bullet power. If lots of targets are bunched together, they also get lots of bullet power.

Good luck. I've been tempted a few times over the last few weeks to pull Neuromancer out and implement some of the features that are missing. If I do that I'd also like to open-source the current version of Neuromancer, since it seems nobody else has seriously tried a surf-everybody strategy.

It's very interesting watching the different movement strategies of different bots - Diamond sticking in the corners and picking off anybody who approaches, Shadow finding empty spots and aggressively clearing out close bots, Neuromancer skipping through the middle of the chaos and somehow dodging bullets.