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The amazing Antbot

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bacillus:
Recently I've been working on a bot that acts like a colony of ants. In the beginning, a single young queen gathers food, until she is large and bloated. Then, she sits down and starts producing offspring. The offspring can either be another young queen or one of the following servants:

* Scout-A scout looks for veggies, then ties to them and drags them in. Once near the queen, the veggie is tied in place.
* Worker-A worker communicates with other workers to find food sources, which are relayed back to the queen.
* Drone-The real muscle of the hive. They collect food from workers and nearby food sources, and relay nrg back to the queen. As well as that, they produce adrenaline when attacked, which is converted to venom, and spat out at enemy bots.Here are some cool features that have been implemented in the bot:

* Gardening-A veggie dragged in by a scout is harvested, but not killed. This ensures a steady food supply for when food is hard to come by.
* Workers remember when they see food, and tell other workers about it.
* Drones tell other drones when an enemy is nearby by sharing adrenaline levels.
* The queen has fertility cycles eg. the body has to be greater than *.timer in order to reproduce
* Drones don't interfer with bots from a different hive.
I still have a communication channel open that I'm dying to use. I really need some help to figure out what to do with it.

Numsgil:
Not sure if it's the best strategy or not, but since most sims have a veggy cap, if you can coral and defend all the veggies from other species, so that no veggy repop events occur, you can starve out your opponent.

bacillus:
It is sort of hinting towards that. The problem is that you run out of space to put the veggies in. Besides, it's not really a competitive bot, more of a human interest one.
EDIT=> actually, I might make the scouts mark the veggies so only members of the same hive feed off it. How's that for an idea?

Numsgil:
You can do lots of things, but I think it's more aesthetically pleasing if it's in the bots' best interest.  Why should hives respect each other's marked food?  It's not in the interest of the hive to play nice with other hives.  Maybe if you implemented some sort of primitive diplomacy.  Hives caught stealing from another's marked food get war declared on them, and the robbed hive tries to kill the offending hive's queen...

I still prefer harvesting and defending veggies, though.  It's a somewhat stable strategy that's in the Hive's best interests.  What I would do is work on forming a defensive ring of warriors around your veggy cache.  The warriors fire backwards to feed occasionally, and feed other ant bots that come looking for nourishment (real ants do this, one ant barfs up some lunch for the other ant).  If an enemy is discovered, the soldier stays put and tries to fire some sniping shots to kill it.  Maybe it alerts more mobile soldiers nearby about the threat (use in/out and transfer the x,y pos of the enemy).  A hive keeps its veggy cache small enough that the soldiers can adequately defend it.

bacillus:
I was playing around with a similar idea, having Guards line the perimeter of the hive. If it is an enemy bot, it tries to kill it, if it's an ant from another hive, it shoots a memory shot that sends it flying backwards.
I'm moving away from the "good of the species" idea and towards the "good of the colony" idea, but that might make the whole thing unstable. I usually run a size 10 sim, and it doesn't take long for one single hive to swarm the map. If you ever ran it, you would see newborn bots (at least drones and workers) hurled backwards. Also, a newborn queen would get slaughtered. Maybe a baby queen overrides the guard's attack instinct?
How about this: A worker will sometimes steal food from the enemy hive. The enemy, if it sees the ant, becomes slightly more hostile and marks the ant. The marked ant may or may not be slaughtered by its own hive, depending on how hostile the hive is. When hostility reaches a certain point, it overrides the "good of the species" instinct and starts killing all ants from different hives.

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