Two hours later I have decided that if I can't get Vampire to be Don Quixote, I can create a new ant that can be Don Quixote, which will bastically just jam Windmill's workers. I think it would only take 4, worst case scenario, nine. And that might just be sufficient

@Draco18s @Draco18s Windmill was hard to build... it wasn't meant to be too easy to blow over... (-:

Sure, you can hem the queen in inside her hub. I'll be impressed if you can do that and leech a significant amount of food and return it to your queen!

By the way, half of the other day's dead-in-the-water scenario looks fixable. (Low priority though - I won't push a release just for that tweak.) Thanks again for catching it and posting it here!

In the long term, Windmill will go the way of the dinosaur... I've been running a series of separate games on Dave's controller involving all 28 recently-current players, which tends to punish accident-prone players more than tournaments of subsets of 16 (MoaR almost always meets the Vampire, Wildfire almost always turns too much food into ants...). Windmill seems to come third in these conditions, and it would need far more games to say which of Glider or Lightspeed is first.

@GNiklasch I'm working on a separate Don Quixote ant right now. I gave up trying to leech food from the windmill queen: navigating to her is too unreliable. Instead Don Quixote is just going to jam her workers and prevent her from gaining more food. It's definitely less reliable, but knocking a few runs out from under windmill is still a good idea.

argh finally got the 4-cyclic rail working, and my problem was that I was trying to match a 4x3 array to the view array by concatenating the rows together..

wot

@Draco18s internally my pattern matching system stores the rail as [[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7,8],[1,2,3,4]] (colors are just examples), and I just joined it together to [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1] to compare to the 9 item view array

I see...

Don Quixote has landed three lances against the tilting windmill, neutralizing somewhere between 9 and 12 workers.

And then got disqualified

I think this attack is as effective as the source material

Running in Dave's controller now that the design is complete to see if it works in a general case situation (rather than my Static Seed 1 for repeatability and debugging). Holy shit this is good enough

Don Quixote may not be very good at neutering Windmill, but the added attention is just enough to knock Windmill from the top spot, reducing its average score from 14 to 12.7 (or I got a super lucky tournament seed)

working on that bot, I'm beginning to be very surprised that Sliding Miners starts up that easily that often

I believe my earlier statement was correct: I think I had a lucky seed. (computer crashed, then did updates, I went to lunch, now I'm back, new random tourney has Windmill at 13.3ish)

Risen to 14.1, although there are 2 games where Don Quixote looks like it had an impact (Windmill did not finish first)

examines one of those games yep, one arm was neutered by Zigurrat, and Don Quixote neutered a second