I’ve created a fairly decent (for me anyway) algo, but it seems to have one weakness - pings. I’ve made several variations of an adaptive defence that spawns destructors around where pings score, but most of them can rush past without being destroyed.
Here are some examples:
I’d appreciate any advice/tips.
The best way to stop pings is to get them to run along a path where they’re in range of destructors. You can see from those replays you invest most of your cores into encryptors while leaving a path for enemy pings that only goes through 4-5 destructor locations. This problem is exacerbated encrypted pings, which are better able to break through defenses and create a shorter path for themselves.
I’ll leave implementation up to you, but that’s the problem.
I’d tried a similar approach where covered the entire right side with filters/destructors but this left me super vunerable to emps
Another problem with your algo is that it doesn’t protect its destructors. They keep being destroyed by the pings, losing you 3 cores. If you invested one extra core to place a filter as well, you would only lose that one and a fraction of the destructor, saving you cores. Because they keep being destroyed, you only have a few destructors attacking each round. If they weren’t destroyed, after a couple rounds, there could be several more.
I’d also given that a try, whilst they’d protect the destructors it was mostly useless as the the pings zoom by anyway.
It wouldn’t help on the first round, but in later rounds, you wouldn’t be just placing destructors to replace the ones that you lost. Instead, you could be building up a larger mass of destructors, which would not be useless.
If you invest all your stuff into encryptors and almost zero defense of course it is going to be vulnerable… to basically every strong attack. This is fine as a strategy, if you can zerg down your opponent with encrypted pings before he does you win. I am curious how your algorithm performs against the aelgoo54 bot. I would imagine that thing will give your algo a decent struggle as it is very opportunistic. I would recommend to use that boss as a sparring partner to improve your defensive structures. If programming is too difficult, play by hand can also give you a lot of ideas to work with. Good luck!