If you don't want to kill the infected bot all you need to do is... not kill it....
A lot of viruses use high vshoot values in order to kill infected bots, but you could set it to "*.nrg 30 div .vshoot store" if you want the infected bot to survive.
The problem is that in the end it gets very complex to infect any bot and not kill it but still have controll.
Using .genes dec will hide the presence of your virus, but only if people use *.genes to reconize virus infections, if they use *.thisgene or save the *.genes value in the first gene, then it's hard to fool them.
And if you want to delete all the genes you need to save the initial value of *.genes minus one and write that value into genes every cycle while deleting the genes...
Already at this point your virus will be getting rather long, and it still wouldn't handle other types of gene reconition.
I would say the most solid vay to make a virus, is to focus on things that are hard to secure against... make a lot of shell, poison, slime or such, things that will spend the energy. Or tie to your own bots and feed them, or do anything that can't just be secured against in some way, like having an odd repro value and zeroing any other repro values, or locking delgene to 0 and stuff like that, you need something that people have to do so they can't secure against it... like just shooting normal shots (If you shoot energy shots the host would become aware of it) and setting the shootval to max... this would prevent reproduction and kill the host rather fast....
Anyways that wasn't why I was replyijng here...
I realy wanted to ask :
Do inline conditions cost the same as normal conditions ?