After the Sprint on 1 October, the organisers announced Slay the Queen. Dragons 0 and 1 are now their teams' queens. If neither team has been eliminated after 500 rounds, the longer queen wins. A dead queen counts as length zero, and ties still go to the longest dragon, then total team length.
Movement changed too. A dragon now gets ceil(length / 4) free steps instead of one, so growing a dragon changes how far it can move without spending its body.
The strategy and training described earlier in this series, and their results, belong to the previous rules.
I'm revisiting the designs in Planning to play and Learning to play as we adapt to the new rules. A tour of our bot records the pre-Queen design and its unfinished integration. The new version in development uses a different architecture.