Simple Soccer

Two teams on a grid pitch. Move your players, win the ball, and kick it through the other team's goal. You write one bot; it is cloned across every player on your side, and each copy decides on its own from what it sees, so teamwork has to emerge, not be dictated.

Rules

• Variants are 1 v 1 and 4 v 4. A match runs every player as its own seat, but ranks the two programs (yours vs theirs).
• Each turn, every player acts at once: step one cell in any of 8 directions, and/or kick if the ball is within one cell.
• A kick adds speed to the ball in the kicked direction. The ball coasts, loses a step of speed each turn (friction), and bounces off the side lines. Stand on a still ball and move, and you dribble it along.
• Send the ball through the goal mouth on the far end to score. Team A attacks right, Team B attacks left. After a goal the team that conceded kicks off from the middle (one of its players starts on the ball at center).
• Most goals at the final whistle wins. If goals are level, the team that held the ball more (was nearest it) wins.

Writing a bot

Each of your players sees the whole pitch: every player's position and team, the ball, the score, and which player it is (you, your team, your team_index). It returns a move and/or a kick. The same code runs for all your players, so use team_index and your position to pick a role (chase, support, defend).

The floor is "whichever of us is closest to the ball chases it and shoots at the goal; everyone else holds a spot goal-side" (the Greedy bot). Past that: mark opponents, pass ahead of a runner instead of dribbling into a crowd, keep one player back as a keeper, and aim kicks for the open corner of the mouth.

Input and output

Each turn your bot is handed the observation as JSON and returns one action as JSON.

Observation: { "you", "team", "team_index", "team_size", "width", "height", "goal_lo", "goal_hi", "attacking_goal_x", "own_goal_x", "players", "ball", "score", "turn", "max_turns", "nonce" }. Each player is { "x", "y", "team" }; the ball is { "x", "y", "vx", "vy" }; score is [teamA, teamB]. The goal mouth is rows goal_lo..goal_hi on an end column.

Action: { "move": "n|ne|e|se|s|sw|w|nw", "kick": "n|ne|e|se|s|sw|w|nw" }. Both are optional; omit one to skip it.

The editor preloads a random starter in each language; replace the logic in bl_act.