Both Territory Immunity and Unprunable say that they block other players from either entering your territory or your trail respectively.
What happens when they try?
Is that a collision that will kill them, are they redirected in some way, or put at a standstill?
Lastly, there doesn’t appear to be a way to tell if another bot possesses a powerup and therefore whether or not you can enter their territory or prune them.
Will this be represented on the map in some way?
Such as using other integers to indicate bot 1’s trail that is currently immune to attack and so on for the other bots.
Hi @Gilad , yeah we’ve recently updated GAMERULES.md to be a bit more verbose on these scenarios. That will go out in the next release which we’re hoping to publish within the next couple of days.
But let me clarify those rules here so long.
Temporary Territorial Immunity does block other players from entering your territory. It’s a bit like hitting a wall; They simply can’t continue forward. But they can change direction and keep going. No harm, no fouls. It’s the bot that already finds itself inside your territory when you pick up Temporary Territorial Immunity that will suffer most as they will be frozen until your powerup runs out.
Unprunable doesn’t mean that a bot can’t run over your trail but rather that, if a bot runs over your trail, you won’t get pruned. By “pruned” we mean losing all of your claimed territory and respawning in your starting position with a new 3x3 territory. So what happens when a bot runs over your trail while you have “Unprunable” active, you will simply lose your active trail and reset to the position inside your territory where you were before starting that trail. So while you derived great benefit from having the powerup active, the other bot didn’t suffer any loss.
Our DTOs don’t currently provide for passing information on what powerups other bots have active and we don’t think it’s necessary but we’ll keep an eye on how this plays out and might consider adding that if it turns out to affect the fairness of the game.
As to the last point; I realised that a bot can just infer if and when another bot gets a powerup based on the powerup locations and the bot locations.
True, but remember, your bot only has knowledge of powerup locations and bot locations that fall within your hero window. As soon as they’re outside of your hero window your bot will not receive info on them.