EDIT: Oh no, sorry, did you say energy going into movement? In witch case my virus is no more useful than Una's shot. Oops redface.gif
That's right. The advantage of the virus is that it will execute on every cycle though. Of course, if the virus is inserted before normal movement genes it will have no effect at all.
Try making a bot that moves forward at a rate of 32000 every cycle.
What you will actually see happening is that a value of 100 will be inserted into .up.
However the bot will not actually accelerate by even that amount. The maximum velocity atainable (never more than about 60) is first determined by the bot's mass, then the difference between that velocity and it's current velocity is used to calculate the energy cost for the acceleration.
Essentially, this bot will reach full speed very rapidly at a considerable one-time cost of a hundred or so energy. After that it will just cruise, spending the odd energy point here and there to maintain its speed.
If you really want to drain the victims energy, make a virus or shot that applies 100 times the negative of the sign of the current value in *.vel, into .up.
This will keep switching maximum acceleration in the opposite direction of present movement. That way it will spend maximum energy on direction changes all the time.