Explosive shots

[rsucoop]

I think an explosive shot that used a shottimer would make the game even more interesting. Currently multibots have the unfair advantage of coordination, and the single bots have no real effective way to destroy them. What if instead you stored a value in shootval and shoot, and then set a timer to say 14 cycles. THe shot would be ejected out using the shotspread to determine accuracy of course, and would eventually slow down from friction or what not, meaning the shotspead would constantly be slowed. Once the timer in the shot went off, it would project as many shots into random space as possible (perhaps another logorythmic fucntion using the .shoot location and the timer). The effect would not return the energy to the bot, but to the center of explosion, meaning the bot might have to remember where it has, how long its been, etc... The shoot location could sned anything, be it waste, venom, poison, or just a shot (I'm guessing someone wants explosive viruses too, but I'm not in favor of that quite yet, seems to impractical), or information shots.

Now multibots could be hit with venom and poison all at once with just one shot, of coarse such a shot would be massive compared to a normal one; so I suggest that it be visible to all bots. Some bot without a defense against such a shot would be destroyed, where as more advanced bots could respond by taking the path back to the original bot (if they saw it move), or simply run away much like monty python. As far as the effective range of the explosion, I leave that for the community to decide (I'm in favor of a range of 100, the effective distance of the eyes).

[Numsgil]

It's an interesting idea, though obviously it doesn't really mirror real life (not that shots ever did of course).

However, it's really a whole range of possibilities that you could open up.  What you're describing is basically like a grenade.  In the same token, you could have proximity mines, homing shots, more than one shot at a time (maybe a bot pays energy and builds an extra shooting organ), etc. etc.  What you end up with is a lot like naval battles.  Huge battleships that pack all kinds of fire power.  Little submarines that can fire torpedoes and escape undetected.  Mines in the water that can blast unwary ships to pieces.

It opens up all sorts of interesting avenues to explore, but it really changes the feel of the program.  Right now combat is pseudo-biological.  I'm not sure I want to abandon that.

[rsucoop]

It's an interesting idea, though obviously it doesn't really mirror real life (not that shots ever did of course).

However, it's really a whole range of possibilities that you could open up.  What you're describing is basically like a grenade.  In the same token, you could have proximity mines, homing shots, more than one shot at a time (maybe a bot pays energy and builds an extra shooting organ), etc. etc.  What you end up with is a lot like naval battles.  Huge battleships that pack all kinds of fire power.  Little submarines that can fire torpedoes and escape undetected.  Mines in the water that can blast unwary ships to pieces.

It opens up all sorts of interesting avenues to explore, but it really changes the feel of the program.  Right now combat is pseudo-biological.  I'm not sure I want to abandon that.

Many life-like organisms are capable of multi-shots, I.e. fungus and molds. Though it is for the dispersal of offspring, which I assume this idea could be lead to mimic certain reproductive behaviors. A single bot could load the repro function into the shotval, and expand the requried energies to build a shell like capsule, immune to viruses, and energy shots, and launch when all the 'eggs' have been built up. Depending on how much energy you allocated and the number of eggs, each egg would share the energy by default, but could be programed/mutated to try and eat all the shell. Once the eggs reach the desired energy range established in the shootval, they hatch and are shot out of the sac in random velocities and begin life anew. This idea could allow for .repro sharing through ties, a bot would send all required pieces for a new bot (I.e. dna and energy) allowing for multi-bots to reproduce at a faster rate than a said single-celled bot. Then of coarse comes the idea of stealing .repro instructions from eachother to aid in sexual reproduction, this all would take a long time, because the rna would only be able to create a single line of a gene at a time, so larger strands would take a lot of time to succesfully develop into the sacks; while smaller strands would be ideal for multiple egg release.

Secondly, the idea for rapid virus deployment could be used with the explosive sacks (not really a shot if it can be larger than a shot in mass).

Also, a rapid shot release in random directions would be a good idea provided that the shots originated from within the bot (but ignored the host bot). Then the idea of the puff fish could be born. Perhaps even the ability to avoid shooting at some angle (I.e. a tie to a conspec or veg) could be implemented to make for stronger bots.