I know I've started on a multibot twice, but never got anywhere... (3 time if you count the time I only got to making the spread and ended up with fruitflies).
I'm not sure exactly how many of the things discussed have been implemented. (But since I'm not helping, I can't complain, I can only apreatiate all the stuff that has been done so far)
I know turning is problematic since the ties angle is relative to your aim, there was some talk about being able to unlock your aim and fix the tie relatively to the other ties.
Also when forming new ties it seems to modify the angle of your existing ties... so building complex shapes is pretty hard, generaly bots with more than 2 ties seemed very hard to get working.
And ofcourse you can only use one of your ties per cycle, making larger complex organisms a lot slower when it comes to comunication, or atleast slower than one could hope for. But I think Eric was considering taking a look at that aswell as the focus eye... (Personaly I think switching the .focuseye would make eye systems less interesting, but for .tienum it would allow some more interesting bots.)
I think the only topic I haven't seen discussed is the tie angles changing with new ties...
Other than that I think ties are faily manageable, but kind of hard to figure out though...
There should probably be a new guide for ties, or maybe Eric could post the code for the newest version of Seasnake, that could help shine some light on a few things
But with the current setup I find it hard to build a realy strong MB using more than 2 ties per cell... or MB tie feeders for that matter. (Tie fighters was originaly a MB, but every time it killed something the tie angles got all messed up, and aiming and reproduction was often a problem, so in the end I just produced 2 offspring for each attack...)