Most effective use of poison?

[Ammeh]

When you produce a poison, what's the best memory location to target?

I've been thinking about this, and the fact that you can only nullify one memory location... I'm just not coming up with any brilliant ideas that would turn an attacker into a piece of cake for you to nom

[Numsgil]

Probably .shoot.  If it's poison, it's triggering because of -1 shots (and something else, I forget what, though).  You can also target .up.  Most bots aren't smart enough to detect that and use .dn instead.  Won't help to kill them but you can run away effectively.

Venom has far more uses.  You can do fun things like force them to store nrg to body.

[Ta-183]

Another idea is to use an entire set of target locations, rather than focusing on a single one.

For example;
Your bot is hit. This triggers the poison shot.
The target of the poison is the first element of the list, which, for our purposes, makes the guy stop shooting.
Next cycle, it iterates the target sequence and now targets .up, next cycle, .dn. This makes it impossible (or just very difficult) for most bots to escape.
Next, target eyes, common conspec locations, ect.
All the while, your bot is gearing up to either fight or run.

But I agree, venom has many more uses.

[Houshalter]

I think you want to make him stop shooting last or the other targets will be useless.

[Ta-183]

True. That definitely sounds like a priority error I would make.

[Numsgil]

Though shots usually take a few cycles to hit their target.  So if you get hit with a shot chances are two or three shots are still incoming.

[Moonfisher]

I'd agree with nums, you want to stop the shots first.
After that you COULD go for eye5 or eyef or maybe up. But you can't realy be sure the oponent is depending on those sysvars for essential tasks (If he doesn't turn or such)
So an easier way may be to go straight for the sysvars you know he'll be using, lige refxpos or refvelup (Not sure those are the correct names but you get the idea).
But shoot is a sure thing, he triggered the poison somehow, so he must be using it.
You can also zero out .deltie if you plan on counterattacking with a tie.
Or you can go for key locations like ploc, vloc or memloc. But again if the oponent doesn't use them it's a waste of effort.

You can also fire a venom shot in the direction you got hit from, this would give you more options.

[Houshalter]

Maybe make a list of the most used sysvars that would be affected with poison. Then you can have them stored in racial memory and randomly modified every generation. Kind of like fruitflies.

[Ta-183]

I always loved fruitflies, brilliant idea that one. I seem to recall that flyfruit had some kind of ability to become infected with foreign viruses and then use them as its own. Anyone care to enlighten me?

And yes, though poison is nice, firing venom in a targeted retaliation does offer far more options for screwing with the attacker. Instead of freezing him, you could get it to run backwards. Not to mention making it aim off to the side and fire its entire store of energy off, but IIRC, that was fixed as it was called a bug.

[Houshalter]

You can use venom to but its nice to have a little poison stored up incase your stabed in the back. And since there may be 3 or 4 more shots incoming it would also be nice to have a rotating ploc while you prepare your venom. Which one is only effective on other species? The poison or the venom? Or was it both?

[Ta-183]

They both affect any bot they hit. Species themselves are next to impossible to define, the only real way of telling them apart is by their conspec.

[Moonfisher]

Fruitflies doesn't use viruses, and has no defences since a dead fruitfly isn't of any importance to their overall strategy. It just uses ties and racial memory, thats about it.
But the IM version Flyfruit (An alge) used fruitflies as a big virus along with some other random collected. And this one just zeroed out any sysvars that could be used in a harmfull way in the last gene. This way the odds favored new viruses landing among the 50 other viruses, wich means the alge would start spreading them by itself without being affected. (A virus lanfing in the last position would be able to affect/kill the alge)

[Houshalter]

To quote the wiki:

Venom does not affect bots of the same species as you.

That means that venom is useless against bots of the same species, which means it will be the first thing to go in an evo sim since most the time bots only fight themselves. Poison on the other hand is usefull against everyone.

[Houshalter]

Sorry to post twice in a row   . But I had an idea. What if you target the other bots .ploc, then you are safe to shoot them, at the same time you can rotate to other targets to stop them from running away or fighting back. Out of curiousity, how long does poison have an effect on the bot?

[Ammeh]

I thought of an evil one   .memloc

It often only gets set once, and if any bot uses it for conspec recognition, it would completely screw it up, more often than not making it attack it's own species indiscriminately.