Code4Life - Feedback & Strategy

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About the Challenge

I would like to thank Roche for this challenge, and I hope that they get good candidates from the players pool. And I also hope that more and more companies follow this path for recruiting.
About the challenge itself, it has some good and bad things:
Pros:

  • Interesting game, simple rules but very complex to master.
  • This time Wood Bosses weren’t that hard, players should be less frustrated. Players well distributed between leagues, with the majority in silver.
  • CG heard players and made nice rules changes. This is a nice thing, and IMO the new rules added more strategy.
  • Referee is a plus, and the game was almost bug free from the start.

Cons:

  • Sorry to repeat that, but CG Points earned on challenges shouldn’t be based on playercount. The 1st player in Code4Life earns less points than player 189th in Coders of the Caribbean. It doesn’t reflect the relative skill at all, it just tends to show the best place on high played games (CotC, GitC and CvZ).
  • Many GUI and art problems: Tracking samples and projects in GUI was kind of impossible. Also the bots were just the same, and with samples hiding its color I was lost about who is who most of the time.
  • Ties are bad scored on a resubmit. If I tied all the initial matches, the system places me the last. How!? why!? That’s wrong, my bot tied a lot and I struggle going thru ranks.
  • No T-Shirt :disappointed:

My main goal on the challenge was just trying to get 1st on any language, for the achievements. I first tried Freepascal, but CG’s version is totally outdated, terrible to code with. So I chose Dart in the end.

About my strategy

My strategy is based on a joke about “viable” strategies https://forum.codingame.com/t/code4life-bugs/2804/86 In theory, going full with undiagnosed samples should be an “strategy” only if you were losing, but I managed to end Legend 42th as main strat. My strategy is what follows:

  1. Start normally, with all rank 1 samples. Trying to not be blocked
  2. At some point, you have enough expertise to be able to complete any undiagnosed rank1 sample with expertise + molecules
  3. Some time later, you reach the Sweet Spot, where you complete them only with expertise. At this point you get 3 rank1 samples completed in 12 turns (1 sample each 4 turns).
  4. Once the 3 Science Projects are discovered, return to a “normal” strategy.

My bot was lacking a lot of things, like taking samples from cloud, and a terrible endgame management. Even with my terrible lack of features, I managed to hold enough to be in top50:
This is an example of my strategy working: Marchete vs Monstruo Carnal! Replay Starting from frame 240 :).
It’s viable but far from ideal, and very RNG. But it was fun to do it, nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition!. I like alternative strategies and in this case it was somewhat viable :slight_smile: I’m not sure if many other players managed to get it working.

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