Have you guys tried playing by hand against maze algos? It may be insightful to see how a human plays against a fully built maze algo and try to emulate that decision making proccess.
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I tried this against my sparing bots, but then I realized that I was winning and making the decisions I was making because I knew before the match started that it was a maze, and I knew what it’s logic was because I had written it. When I tried to “pretend to be an algo”, I sometimes lost by hand against my sparing mazes.
In this particular meta, it might be a fair strategy for adaptives to assume at turn 0 that they face a maze, and hope that they can recover if they discover it’s something else.
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Then you wait a turn to deploy your strategy until the opponent commits to a maze? Cores don’t decay like bits do. If you have a successful strategy against a maze it probably still works at turn 1 or 2. Just put in the effort to make your algo more adaptive and you will be able to counter static strategies as long as you can come up with a hard counter and deploy it at the right time. (this assumes your opponent is static, for a dynamic opponent… well that is where the fun starts 
)
good luck!
You CAN beat a maze-algo even after the maze is build:
https://terminal.c1games.com/watch/812513
I know sawtoothV2 here didn’t play perfectly (it did not used ping when it would have been very efficient), but Aelgoo53 is not perfect either (some firewall removals were late, it has no long term strategy…) and contains no hard-coding to beat maze
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What a spectacular replay! I remain a complete fan of your algos 
. Very interesting counter measure. I haven’t seen your algos be this aggressive before (naked encryptor ping cannon, wow).
However I think your method is too slow. With the same style of attack but deployed a few turns earlier (e.g. turn 6) with slightly less encryptors you could have completely crushed the maze, and the scoring pings could have then resulted in more encryptors to strengthen your position more. The ping counter would then not have worked also, because they would run into your own shielded pings. I’ll have to consider whether such a strategy would work against my algos too, and those are not even mazes
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