That's a whole lot of memory locations. I played around with the idea of these pheromone highways, but the paths could only be followed by individuals and not shred with others. Why remember places where there is no food? Maybe tracking the ant's position when coming back from food may help.
Say the bot needs to maneuver around another hive, it is important that it remembers the waypoint to get around the hive, and not cause tensions. Since your ant bots are very good at being agressive, it is the best interest of your bots to remember important information such as how to avoid other hives and not infringe on their food collecting. The idea is so no matter what your bot decides to do, it will always have a return point. I have detailed the conditions more for the 20 waypoints, now it only counts to the timer when the bot is facing away from the hive, so you dont get overlaps in waypoints, and it uses a comparison for distance instead of timers to activate the intial timer of 200 cycles now reduced to 50. Every 200 botwidths could be recorded as safety points. You already have a complex mechanism for communication, its a matter of genetic language. ''I/O 7-X coordinate of last food sighting ''I/O 8-Y coordinate of last food sighting and I/O 3 are for commands of some sort. So I/O 3 allows your btos to say something meaning the 8 and 7 I/Os should be stored here, or whatever. Say you want the waypoints to be used by everyone, limit scout repoduction to one until the queen is given a highway, make all default births dormant for 30 cycles, so the queen can write the locations in their memory, having them all tie together to exchange the missing pieces will make this faster for the queen. Now you have 20 waypoints, where scouts and warriors can go, search for food, protect each other and maintain the perimeters near food. THe protocols for when and what btos communicate can be determined using I/O 2 since all types are there. Warriors and Scouts could exhange information on enemies and veggies to make sure both are taken care of for the queen, and I/O 3 could also be used as an override to make all bots active for war with I/O 7 and 8 giving them the coordinates of the enemy's last position, and it might be useful for I/O 9 to tell how long ago the enemy was spotted near the queen. THis information is vital, the bots could fan out to cover all possible locations of the enemy, and communicate locations with ties, a wall of ants if you will, all capable of moving for the queen. I like the idea of a super inteligent ant, even tho it will require 90 memory locations, this also means your bot will still do something with mutations later on; as the locations and values change, the bots will exhibit different behaviors as a result of it. Keep mutations chances very low in occurance, so it doesn't fall apart everywhere, that could be detrimental.
Ideally you would store 500 waypoints, but the genetic coding would have to be broken up since the customizable sysvars are sparatic. Other than that, you wouldn't need Slim Evo's bot id gene, its too big for this project, use something like;
cond
*.robage 0 =
start
40 .memloc store
0 .memval store
stop
cond
*.robage 32000 sub 2 mod 4
start
.memloc inc
.memval inc
stop
something for how a waypoint array counter would work wiht only a handful ogf smaller genes. for comparison purposes, make a gene to check that you dont overlap certain waypoint types, and check always enemy waypoints with all your waypoints to make decisions based on safety, or need for food.