Article 1760 of rec.games.corewar: Path: hellgate.utah.edu!cs.utexas.edu!not-for-mail From: wsheppar@st6000.sct.edu (Wayne Sheppard) Newsgroups: rec.games.corewar Subject: Night Crawler - the code Date: 16 Apr 1993 14:19:24 -0500 Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway Lines: 171 Sender: daemon@cs.utexas.edu Message-ID: <9304161916.AA46448@st6000.sct.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu After watching many battles between Night and Iron Gate, I recognized the weakness of Stone/Imp. The imps rarely get stunned. Only a hit at the head would get it. A hit anywhere else would quickly be overwritten. The scanners usually stunned the stone, making the imps a sitting duck. Also gone are the days when the imps would get the kill. With every warrior having a gate or some other imp defence, the stone was the place to get the win. Like most of the older impspiral/dwarfs, Night had a very slow startup. I was using a Nimbus style startup. 16 process impspiral took a long time to launch. The first imp did not execute until after 100 cycles had passed. Of course this made the stone start slow, so I had to split a lot of processes to it to speed it up. To make improvements, I went to a smaller spiral with a quicker binary launch. The first imp executes on the 35 cycle. This made the stone much quicker. The seven process imp spiral can run into a coreclear before it has set up a gate. This turns many losses into ties or wins. The stone part is a four line dwarf with a subtraction coreclear. Copied away from the decoy, it is a very small target for scanners. # of DAT bombs for Cycles Night Night Crawler 100 6 15 200 17 37 300 35 62 500 81 115 As you can see, the stone puts out bombs quicker that before. Score results for NC III against scanners --------------------------- W L T 226 Charon v9.0 73 20 7 220 Agony 5.1 71 22 7 198 Iron Gate 62 26 12 192 Medusa's v7 61 30 9 173 Dragon Spear 55 37 8 And finally the code: ;redcode ;name Night Crawler III ;author Wayne Sheppard ;wsheppar@st6000.sct.edu ;strategy Forward decrement ;kill NC III ; ;Night Crawler is an improvement over the standard imp/stone. ;The features: ; -quick startup, bombing starts immediately ; -small ring lets stone run faster ; -small ring can gate crash slow coreclears ; -small profile stone is smaller target for scanners ; -large decoys to confuse scanners ; -forward decrementing, might disable Paratroop attack imp equ impcopy+1700 ;imp start hide equ 1600 ;stone location stone spl 0,<-1001 ;Stone is only four lines long mov <21,1+2234 ;Bombs at light speed sub 1,-1 ;mod 2 pattern djn -2,<-2234 ;converts to addition coreclear dat