There is IMHO a missing state:
4: buster just stunned another buster
With the stunned buster id in the value
Without that, it’s hardly possible to have reliable informations about the stunning possibilities of an opponent buster
Would it be possible to have this in gold league?
Thanks
[Edit] Mhh, just see it can be contradictory with state 2 in case of mutual stun ; in fact it should replace state 2, or value for state 2 should be “If the buster is stunned the id of the buster who stunned him.” ; so I guess it’s too big of a change
Without that, it’s hardly possible to have reliable informations about the stunning possibilities of an opponent buster
But it’s still possible.
Would it be possible to have this in gold league?
Probably, some people have already done some work to keep this information. This addition to rules would make their work meaningless. It would be cruel.
Well, I’m quite sure there are some cases where it’s not without assuming things (like busters won’t do a void move).
A buster who just stunned can be in 0 or 2 state, and you can have several opponent’s busters within 1760 with this state. Cases of mutual stun or double mutual stun or two stuns vs one are quite hard to manage as well.
Imagine I have two busters who can stun you, I make one stun, and the other moving to it’s own position, you won’t be able to say which one did it
But it’s like P2 score in Smash the Code, I guess it’s hard to add this info without changing the way peeps are managing state (+ like you said those who already worked hard to have this information in a relatively fiable way).
I agree. Only in simple cases it is possible (e.g. 1 vs 1).
But if there are two enemies that might have stunned me, I cannot tell which. Then one is dangerous and one is not for the next 20 turns.
This is a problem when I am trying to get past a blockade into my base. If I can stun 3 enemies, but I don’t which ones can steal my ghost, then the outcome becomes just a probability guess.
Yup, there are some classic cases where you cannot tell when you have several opponent busters within the range :
If you cannot see one of them anymore because you moved too far from him, so you don’t know it’s state ;
If one of them was busting a ghost, and you stunned him.
Maybe there are some other cases, but with this two only it’s already a pain in the ass.
On the contrary, the “If the buster is stunned the number of turns until he can move again.” value is quite useless, as you can easily see when you are stunned and were not the turn before.
This value would have benefited from being “id of last buster who stunned this buster”
Yes good idea.
This is why we need a reserved ‘empty’ value in the inputs. So we can fix problems found in the game when a new league opens.
Currently no changes are possible after the start of the contest, because we don’t want to break existing programs.
But it is hard to have the contest coded perfectly before it starts, having 2000+ people competing will always find some new issues, and a small flexibility would be very useful to the organisers?
Sounds like a good idea at first, but I would have a problem with that:
During the contest a game itself should not be changed (unless it’s an obvious bug that contradicts the given rules/game engine). Giving information away that was an element of uncertainty of the game IS changing the game. As nikita said, people might have spent time on “guessing” a reasonable value for the missing input. In a time limited contest, making the input available and wasting the work of would be very bad. Imaginge they would decide now to remove the fog of war on the game, because it makes it impossible to calculate all enemy positions deterministically… All the work spend on exploration strategies would go to waste.
If we would have designed the game differently FROM THE BEGINNING is another question For example I would have made ghosts captured in the base still visible with -1 stamina, so you can see how many ghosts your enemy has captured if one of your busters is at the enemy base (like you can see it in the replay of the game)
That last point would be a very useful improvement, I considered asking for it too. Basically we never know what the opponent’s score is. Which is strange for a game where the only objective is to beat your opponent’s score!
It’s an 8-day contest, if everyone realises that the rules might still evolve in the beginning they won’t start by writing complicated patches.
If the organisers want to say “we don’t want to make changes” then that is their decision, that’s fine.
I just hate it when they say “good point, we would like to do that, but can’t sorry”.
(like busters won’t do a void move).