Author Topic: Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08  (Read 10480 times)

Offline Peter

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #15 on: October 12, 2008, 11:36:36 AM »
Quote from: Numsgil
My vote is not.  It's not balanced, and even if it were I think it's against the spirit of F2.
Well there are more top-bots in F2 that are against the 'spirit of F2' with those insta-kill tie attacks. I feel like instakill is more F1-like.

Quote from: abyaly
Personally, I'm more in favor of merging F1 and F2 completely and making F3 the "new F2". There isn't that much difference between F1 and F2 right now anyway. I could make an F2 bot that utilizes top F1 tactics, and moonfisher has alluded to being able to do the same.
Well, I'm feeling a little to this too.
F3 is no venom, no ties, no virus, and I gues no sexrepro right. Well this is coming close towards a whole other league setup. Time for a specific topic.
Oh my god, who the hell cares.

Offline Moonfisher

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #16 on: October 12, 2008, 09:18:37 PM »
Maybe there should be a rule against forming new ties in F2... so you could react to them and be able to compete in F1 but not actualy use them as an attack...
And as far as I understand instantkills aren't suposed to be possible, so it's more of a "legal exploit"... so I guess there could be like a grey area rule about not using exploits in F2...
Either way I think it would be a shame to merge F1 and F2... bots tend to get lost in the starting gate when they don't hold a spot in some league... and there should be a step step in between F1 and F3, try to keep a soft learning curve... I think the F2 rules just need some tweeking...

Offline bacillus

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #17 on: October 13, 2008, 12:07:36 AM »
Even with capping .shootval, there's still a lot of memory locations such as producing defense systems, forcing reverse tie-feeding(not sure about this one) and other nasty, I less efficient, stuff to be done with memory shots. If not banning them, how about capping ALL values that result in an action eg. leaving .xpos and the like free?
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Offline Commander Keen

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #18 on: October 13, 2008, 01:45:40 AM »
I could cut all bots that instakill from the F2 league. It probably wouldn't have too much of an effect, besides removing Astronomo and probably severly weakening Spinner, but it would make the F2 league a lot fairer.

Offline Moonfisher

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #19 on: October 13, 2008, 07:17:17 AM »
I think most of the production related stuff is capped... either that or it's so cheap it takes a while to kill a bot this way...
But yes it shouldn't be possible to kill by havng someone spend energy on 32000 venom in one cycle... but I'm pretty sure they're all capped...
And for memmory shots you actualy need to be big enough for your shots to travel anywhere wich means big enough to get hit... where a tie can be formed by a bot size 1 with less than 100 nrg and get an oponent to kill itself just by boosting shootval...
The point is that even with shootval capped there's still a lot of things you can do with ties... theres .mrepro... you can mess up eyes, sometimes conspec, make a lot of shell to slow people down or wichever is more effective. And my impression was that ties weren't suposed to play such a big role in F2.

Also removing the instantkill from Spinner wouldn't hurt too much, removing ties however would force it to focus on combat rather than dirty tricks. Venom and mem shots are still strong, but if instantkills aren't allowed then it think it should be ok.

Either way there's no rush to decide on anything yet, but to me it seems like the "exploits" belong in F1 only... and possibly ties aswell.
Also if you're not allowed to form ties in F2 people could use any form of tie defences they like, like counter leeching or instakills, as long as they don't form any ties themselves...
Reverse tie feeding is powerfull, but it's only in F1 and it does take a while to kill a bot this way... not sure if it's still to powerfull though.
And tricks to kill off small bots should be allowed IMO, atleast as long as small bots seem to have the upper hand. I like that you can just make a size 1 bot eat it's remaining body and such.

And I still think sexrepro should be locked in league fights... or be more strict about how to breed, like taking less of the fertilizers dna, or only genes that more or less match the length of one of ones own genes. Basicaly just something preventing alga minimalis from turning into a large intricate bot of many or very large genes in just a couple of cycles. I liked how viruses need to be as short as possible because of the charge time... maybe semen should need to be stored before you can shoot it... so it would work more or less like charging a virus, but when it's charged you just have 100 sperm shots available...
Anyway just venting ideas... just seems overpowered to put that much DNA into an alge at the beginnning of a league fight.

Offline bacillus

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #20 on: October 13, 2008, 11:51:32 PM »
I think slime is capped at 10000.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
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Offline Numsgil

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #21 on: October 14, 2008, 02:08:28 AM »
Probably all those construction sysvars should be capped to either a hard number or a percentage of body.  I'm not against weaselly ways to kill a bot, but you should have to actually put some effort into it beyond storing one number in one location.

Offline Moonfisher

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #22 on: October 14, 2008, 12:38:29 PM »
How about capping according to costs... so you can only spend X % of your energy on each resource per cycle.
cap = X * nrg/100
if cost * amount > cap
amount = cap/cost

Or something like that anyway, so you can't burn off too much nrg at the time, maybe with a maxcap aswell so bots with lots of nrg aren't too vulnerable to loose too much too fast...

Offline Numsgil

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #23 on: October 14, 2008, 01:51:41 PM »
Quote from: Moonfisher
How about capping according to costs... so you can only spend X % of your energy on each resource per cycle.
cap = X * nrg/100
if cost * amount > cap
amount = cap/cost

Or something like that anyway, so you can't burn off too much nrg at the time, maybe with a maxcap aswell so bots with lots of nrg aren't too vulnerable to loose too much too fast...

I'm leaning more towards basing it on body, since that makes a certain amount of logical sense (more body = more internal mechanisms for powering a shot, or making venom, etc.).  I think it's fine for huge bots to have to keep more nrg on hand to guard against these sorts of attacks.  It's sort of like a larger bank keeping more liquidity to guard against runs.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2008, 01:52:41 PM by Numsgil »

Offline abyaly

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #24 on: October 15, 2008, 03:12:12 PM »
Slime, shell, venom, and poison are capped at 100 made per cycle. Energy transfer rate for .fdbody and .strbody is capped at 100. I propose the cap for each variable-energy action be .body/10 energy spent (or gained, in the case of .fdbody; or replacement cost, in the case of negative .mkshell; you get the idea). This would lump everything together with the current tie-feeding rate, solve the shootval issue, and stop .vshoot suicides.

Also, perhaps rather than merge F1 and F2, we could simply ban .tieloc and .tieval from F2 along with sexrepro. If the combined changes of this post were implemented, F2 would be much more F2-like than it has been in a while.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2008, 03:15:21 PM by abyaly »
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline Moonfisher

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #25 on: October 15, 2008, 06:10:09 PM »
Why not just say that you're not allowed to form ties in F2 ? This would be very easy to spot if a bot is breaking the rule, and it would still be possible to implement tie defences so your bot can compete in F1 aswell...
Also I think a grey area rule that sais you can only use "exploits" in F1... so once a dirty trick is deemed too powerfull it's restricted to F1...
And I still think -8 shots need a charge time before being able to fire, or should only contain the part of your DNA you've charged when you fire the shot, or something like that.
Viruses and -8 shots are very similar, and both have the purpose of getting your DNA into someone else. But a virus will take ages to charge just a single gene, and it will be fired in a random direction, it's expensive to fire the virus, and slime will stop it. A -8 shot can be fired instantly containing 32000 pb with no charge time, no added costs, you can aim the shot, it can contain more than one gene, and the only disadvantage is that you need to be closer to the oponent and follow up with mem shots to force reproduction. And mem shots can be blocked by poison, but I think it was something like 200 poison to stop 1 mem shot...
The uses for viruses just seems very narrow compared to raping... I have a hard time imagining anything I could use a virus for in a league fight... I'm sure there's some way it could still be usefull, maybe as a suplement to raping... but still, I much prefered viruses since you had to think about how you where building them, making them as short as possible, nothing was added unless it was nessesary. Now it just seems too easy...
Not saying I have a great idea for fixing this, but IMO something need to be done

Offline abyaly

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #26 on: October 15, 2008, 10:23:08 PM »
Sharefeeders and multibots should be OK in F2, since nothing really extreme is going on. However, bots using ties for super effective killing shouldn't. The difference? .tieloc and .tieval.
There is no tie memory manipulation, venom insertion, or (quick) energy transfer without tieloc and tieval. Tie communication can still occur through tout.
Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Offline Moonfisher

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Saber (F2)(abyaly)07-10-08
« Reply #27 on: October 16, 2008, 07:04:41 AM »
I guess you could set it that way... although it creates sort of a grey area... what if a poorly written multibot tends to tie to alge and make them part of the organism sharing energy with it ? How would we even know this was from being poorly written rather than a clever behavior to work around tie feeding ?
Just makes it a litle harder to check if a bot is misusing ties... you would also have to ban mem/venom shots that include .tieloc/.tieval, or you could just have 2 bots cause the oponent to feed you...

There's also the issue that most of the current F2 bots have tie defences in order to be able to compete in F1... one of them being excalibur... one I would hate to see go...

I see the point of having multibots and sharefeeders in F2... but I'm not sure we currently have any of those in F2.
With no tieloc or tieval allowed all the old F2 bots would have to be reviewed. And some may be weaker in F1 without their tie defences...
Maybe there's another way to handle it... that I can't think of...