Reflecting tanks' gun energy?

[amongonz]

I've noticed most Robocode-like games allow the radar to detect the other tanks' energy. This allows lots of tactics, such as:

• Detecting shots from other tanks, by checking the "energy drop".
  • Notice that the actual projectile target is unknown, and fire-power has to be derived from the energy difference.
• Prioritize evasive angles from tanks with high energy levels.
• Tracking virtual projectile positions or trajectories to refine the movement path ("wave surfing", quite competitive on one-vs-one).

I admit some of them a quite advanced, but provides a way to make more reactive movement patterns, more interesting matches and makes it more difficult to have a "finished" bot, since there is much more room for improving and researching.

As a downside, more possible tactics means more bots taking more memory and/or computing resources; that could become a security problem, but that should probably go on another issue.

[awilliams]

Thanks @AmonTessin, I agree that providing the other tanks' health would allow for more complex gameplay and tactics.

As far as it being a security issue, I'm not too worried about that because the same problem exists now - a bot could easily do very resource intensive operations.

What I am worried about is backwards compatibility. Introduction this change would be a change to the bot API, even though it should be backwards compatible. I haven't figured out how to manage these API changes yet. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks for your interest in RTanque!