Chameleon

Chameleon

Unlike other critters, Chameleon’s think as a “species” when it comes to fighting and moving. However, each chooses their color independently.

Fighting and Recovering

Each Chameleon will use the strategy that beats (and thus is different from) the most common attack used on chameleons. This should imply to you that the species (i.e., class) as a whole should keep information about how often each strategy is used against any chameleon and play the counter-strategy to the most-used one.

How might you keep track of such information? Well, the Critter superclass has a recover() method that is called by the game but is not implemented yet. At the end of each and every battle, the game calls recover() for each critter and passes a boolean called won that indicates whether the critter won the battle and a constant called opp_attack indicating the opponent’s fighting strategy (constants.ROAR, constants.POUNCE, or constants.SCRATCH). You should implement the recover() method in your critter to gain access to and use these parameters. Keep in mind that you should not change the input parameters for recover() because they are controlled by the game.

Moving

Each Chameleon’s movement strategy is based on the species’ overall success rate. If the species is not doing well (i.e., the species has lost at least half the total number of battles), a chameleon will try to avoid other critters. On the other hand, if the species is doing well, then a chameleon will become aggressive and move towards other critters.

To determine where to move, you should make use of the Critter superclass’s neighbor_threat() method. Given two parameters, the current chameleon’s self_info and a constant direction, neighbor_threat() returns the total number of other critters in that given direction. For instance, if there are critters to the southwest and southeast of the current Chameleon, then neighbor_threat(self_info, constants.SOUTH) will return 2. Although neighbor_threat() includes other critters on the diagonals, a reminder that critters themselves can only move in cardinal directions. Finally, you get to decide how to handle the movement decision in the case of a tie.

Note that neighbor_threat() has been implemented for you in the Critter superclass. There is no need to re-implement this method yourself. Instead, use the neighbor_threat() method that has been inherited by Chameleon.

Color

All Chameleons should start out as constants.GREEN. However, one of the ways Chameleons differentiate themsleves from other Chameleons is by emulating the appearance of its most recent (losing) opponent by display the opponent’s color. A reminder this is information you can get from the fight methods’ opp_info parameter. So, if one Chameleon beats an Elephant, it will become constants.GRAY on the next turn, but no other Chameleons will change their color as a result of this fight.