Still Time To Hack Your Avatar

In The Finals?

First off, congratulations. Second, if you made it into the finals and don't have an avatar, shame, shame on you and your family, lol. Seriously though, if you hurry I'm sure you can still submit an avatar and below is a really cool tip you should implement.

How To Make It Awesome

Only use black, red, blue and transparent colors. Red and blue both being the specific ones used in the game client and black being the color used between matches during the tournament. Furthermore be careful to use solid colors around the edges with no dithering or the effect won't work. In doing so you can get pretty creative and do something like this:

One Image Multiple Uses

As you can see the same image will appear differently on the transition screen between matches and then depending if you are the red player or the blue player. The example above (feel free to use it for your bot) is a sample to show off what is possible but I think it would look a lot better if you got more creative and interlaced the pixels one line at a time or in a checkered board. Here is what interlacing looks like:

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Please don't use my idea to do anything childish. Let's be adults here and do something epic or witty and not something that may get you and your team into trouble.

Good Game - Well Played

GG WP

The qualifying tournament has come to an end. All that is left now is the finals tournament on Saturday. Good job everyone! It's really great actually to see the teams cheering each other on, the sportsmanship here is pretty awesome. Right now people are flying in from all over the world to make it to the finals tournament, travel safe guys and girls.

Thanks For Viewing

Thanks again to everyone who followed along with this blog during the coding portion of this month. I really appreciate the support. I hope someone found something here that helped with his/her thought process and coding.

Uploading Maps To Share

What If

I kind of think it would be cool if there was a section on the scrimmaging server where teams could upload maps they have made. Not only allowing others to scrimmage with them online but also giving the option to download them for testing offline.

Pros

Other teams and the devs could see more maps and test cases for bots. You would get to see maps that other players share which may help you to realize your bot doesn't work in some edge case, like let's say a really tight maze maybe, lol.

Cons

There are none, shut up, lol. Let's do this. Map uploading hype.

Reality

You can actually share files through git or irc but come on, where's the fun in that. Plus the logistics keep that from being nearly as cool as the ability to drop them right onto the scrimmage server.

Shout-Out

Props To Viral Villager

This is just a shout-out to Viral Villager, who if you guys don't know, is a 13 year old that is coding a bot for Battlecode. I really wish I had been that far ahead of the game at age 13.

Oh and wait, not only does this amazing dude have a one man team for Battlecode, he also has a YouTube channel. He codes but he likes making animation even more.

You are rocking it Viral Villager, or Joshua, hope you don't mind me talking about you here (if you do just holler and I'll delete this).

You guys should check out his work and subscribe or something. This guy is going places, mark my words.

Here are a couple of his animation videos for example:

Keep up the good work Viral, you are rocking it sir!

Quick Tips Learned From Seeding

Rapid Fire Notes From Seeding

Making a few quick notes here about small things that could really help your bot strategy. Hopefully someone finds something useful here but you can probably just call me captain obvious.

Kill Archons

I keep seeing one team nail down an archon from the other team but not kill it. This does help because the archon has no room to produce any units, but often times you can easily kill off the guy and take the win.

I understand there is some justifiable hesitation for killing off archons at the very beginning of the match. With the archon's health being so high logic would reason that spending that bullet income on building up a strong base of trees may be the better way to go. I guess it all depends on the situation.

In general I would say that you can try to soldier rush right away, if that goes well then you may want to kill off those archons. If that rush didn't go so well, or wasn't even possible, then you may want to focus on building up your economy and killing off gardeners instead.

Either way I would say once you get deeper into the rounds you should make the switch to focusing on archons over building up economy.

Getting Stuck

If you can notice that you have become stuck, and relay that information to units around you so that you can work together to get unstuck, you will go places my friend. Pun sort of intended, sorry. Seeing several situations where teams pin themselves in and stop producing new units.

Seriously though, there were countless situations where teams never moved or did so very little during the entire match because they couldn't figure out how to dig out of their starting position. If you are completely stuck, at least be buying victory points, but better yet try to figure out how to get moving.

Often times teams built themselves into a standstill. A gardener surrounding itself with trees needs to decide if it has room to do so first, or in some cases needs to decide to let a tree die to make space for spawning more bots.

Pathing

If you feel like you are getting caught up this might be something to begin focusing on. Bug pathing seems pretty strong but may be nerfed by maps coming up in future tournaments, it looks like they are already trying to make your bugging difficult but I would bet they try even harder.

I think the best thing to think about when pathing is if you can notice that you aren't getting anywhere in the long run and decide to do something random or different to make progress.

Maybe more important/effective than great pathing would be having a general knowledge of where things are on the map and then clearing space instead of learning how to path.

Forced Friendly Fire

Looks like you can often times use one of your scouts to get the other team to shoot at itself. Just move around near a group of them and get others to fire back at you, effectively hitting themselves because they can't move fast enough or because they care more about shooting at you than worrying about shooting at themselves in the background.

Buy Victory Points

Always a good idea to bank a few victory points early on. If you saw the troll map which was a maze where you only had enough room to build a gardener and a lumberjack then you probably also saw that most of the times that map was played it came down to other deciding factors like victory points.

Seeding Meta

Scouts Nerfed

With the changes to the game made after the sprint tournament scouts have effectively been nerfed. They are no longer strong enough to pull off a scout rush.

New Meta

The seeding tournament has just started but it's looking like the new meta is solider rush, mixed with a lot heavier use of tanks than we have seen before. Most teams are staying away from victory points unless they realize they are able to buy them all out.

Looks like you can do pretty well if you start with a hard solider rush and then if that doesn't pan out you need to fall back on building up a tree base so that you can have the economy to bankroll your long-game strategy. That way you can build up to a larger soldier rush, tank push or victory point buyout.

Seeding Tournament Coming Up

Pencils Down - Tests In

The deadline for submitting bots for the seeding tournament has passed and it doesn't look like there will be any more lectures from now till the end of the competition. I wonder what new maps and strategies will turn up during the seeding tournament.

It'll Be Interesting To See

It seems now with automated matching up and running it's almost as if they loosely followed the earlier posted idea for the scrimmage server. Which leads me to wonder how much different the tournament results will be from the rankings currently shown from the automated matches. I guess we'll see.

The first tournament was a test of robustness, making sure you didn't overlook any obvious situations that should have been thought of. Such as if your archon is pinned down and can't move. It was also a chance for the devs to see what kinds of game balancing were still needed.

I think this tournament will be a lot more interesting in the fact that everyone's bots seem to be getting pretty complex and far more intelligent. I think the tournament will be more about endurance than robustness as before.