Take turns 46-49 of this game as basis for discussion: https://www.codingame.com/replay/160280830
My claim is that aside from predicting the future, there’s essentially no way to stop snaffle 8 from scoring even with the most perfect reactionary bot you could code. Here’s the breakdown of events:
- turn 46: he casts flip, snaffle 8 speed is small
- turn 47: flip activates, snaffle gets huge speed boost (vx = 1800)
- turn 48: (first time my bot sees any changes to snaffle 8), I cast petrifico
- turn 49: petrifico activates, but snaffle is already scored
Why I think this is wrong is because as a human player, I would clearly see the “Flipendo” exclamation and the flashy projectile of the spell, so I would naturally react before it even activates, yet my perfect killing machine would patiently and blindly wait for speed vectors to propagate…
Easiest fix that wouldn’t break current API would be to make use of entitiy state field and at least flip it to 1 if entity is (going to be) under ANY effect. It will still be an issue to figure out if it’s for ex. Flipendo or Accio, but at least my bot would have an option to attempt to react…