Comprehensive Building Guide

This guide shall encompass general principles of building for the purpose of better combat performance. Specific details
regarding particular archetypes will not be mentioned.

Chapter 0. Choose your archetype. Learn the Meta.

This section is for newer players who would like to jump straight into the game and play the most optimal build paths in
the current meta.

If you are new to the game who do not have a lot of techs unlocked, choose one of the following:

Laser Mechs. Aim for 1500-1800 CPU, use Hornets, Blasters or Vaporizers and only heavy
cubes. No Shields, No Light Cubes, No Medium Cubes. Have 3 or more of the largest legs you
can afford.

Secondary weapons can include Ions, Nanos, Flak, and Rail.

Secondary movement can include Hovers and Larger Thrusters for backup and speed
respectively. *Note* Small thrusters are not useful for speed, only agility.

Role: Frontline fighter/Bruiser

Laser Hovers. Aim for 1400-1750 CPU, Use the largest laser you have, use only medium
cubes. Use of shields is fine if carefully placed and not excessively so.

Secondary weapons can include Ions, Nanos and Teslas.

Secondary movement can include Thrusters, small for agility and large for speed.

Role: Frontline/Mid range Fighter/Bruiser/Support

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If you have more parts available, choose one of the following:

“Meta” Hover. Current as of September 2018, these hovers are considered the meta hovers.
They carry a Leviathan and some form of ion. Ranging from 1500-1750 CPU with thrusters for
speed, these usually dish out high damage against ground and air with a decent durability to
survive a full volley of Plasma or Impaler.

Equip Nano for the exceedingly strong healing which allows two to survive and overcome fights
against overwhelming numbers.

Role: All purpose frontline bruiser/power house.

Countered by: Mortar, Impaler

Alternative Meta Hovers. These use smaller Lasers to aid in dueling potential trading off long
range DPS. Smaller lasers also tend to be easier to aim by those whom are not very skilled with
leviathan.

Everything else about them is the same.

One note here for all meta hovers currently is the use of
bottom hover blades far below the robot body:

Countered by: Mortar

Drones. More specifically, Cam drones. These require some initial knowledge to build, but
there are plenty of them on the factory to tear apart to see how thrusters and rudders are
placed. Rudder is very important for them for speed and stability. These can use all manner of
lasers from Blasters to Disintegrators as well as Plasma devastators or Nanos.

It is advised that you learn to build a drone from looking at examples.

Role: Long Range Harasser/Skirmisher/DPS.

Countered by: Impaler

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 Mortar Hovers. Medium cubes, thruster spam, and secondary weapons may include
Rail Erazer, Lasers, or Nanos. Around 1400-1650 CPU

These are built extremely low for the mortars to have the minimal minimum range.

Role: Mid Range, Backline fire support. Anti-Capping, and Besieging Caps.

Countered by Drones, Plasma

Mortar Mech Copters. Medium cubes, Somewhat tanky, more all purpose than
Mortar Hovers. Around 1500-1700 CPU.

Secondary weapons include Lasers, Flaks, Rail and Nanos.

Role: Mid Range Fighter/Bruiser, backline fire support. All Purpose.

Countered by Drones, Plasma

Impaler Sprinters. Medium Cubes, squishy. Secondary Movement includes Rotors,

Thrusters and Hovers for Flight, Speed, and backup/Jump enhancement respectively.

These usually are around 1100-1600 CPU.

Secondary weapons include Lasers and Nanos.

Role: Sniper/Backline DPS/Glass Cannon. Long Range Degunning.

Countered by very high health bots, Plasma, and Nanos.

Currently weakest weapons across the board with no redeeming purpose:

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Currently weakest movements across the board with no redeeming purpose:

Final Chapter comments.

Meta will change with more balance patches and the anticipated boost removal. All of the above is tentative and only
accurate as of September 2018.

Other archetypes are playable and potentially viable but not competitive and thus are not listed.

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Chapter 1. Boosts system

All robots are currently governed by 3 Boosts that impact how your robot will perform statistically.

Damage boost is the simplest of the three. The lower your robot’s CPU, the higher the damage boost. The relationship is
however not linear. It is generally pretty efficient from 0-1625 CPU with 1625 CPU being most efficient, then quickly
tapers down to 0% past 1625 CPU. See graph:

One should always try

to balance damage
boost and the health
of your robot. You may
deal 80% extra
damage, but if others
can kill you by looking
at you the wrong way,
is that really worth
while?

There is a reason why

meta bots typically are
no lower than 1000
CPU.

It should be noted that Damage boost does not change throughout the course of a match, no matter how much cpu you
have lost from being damaged.

Health Boost is pretty straight forward too. There are parts such as Mech legs, Tank tracks,
light/medium/heavy/compact cubes provide a health boost. This is basically a multiplier to all parts of your bots health.
Due to Compact cube’s 3 CPU cost, it is in fact the least tanky block to build a bot out of since it effectively offers you
1/3rd the health boost of an equivalent CPU robot. However, due to its size, it is still ideal for agile robots that depend on
the inability to be easily hit for survival.

Health boost is kept on the robot even after the parts providing said boost is destroyed.

Speed boost adds a bit of a twist to the formula. It is only applied in the direction the movement part providing it is
facing, and so long as the movement parts are able to be engaged.

Wheels in the air do not provide speed boost even if the statistic in the garage indicate otherwise.

Thrusters facing side to side will not provide speed boost when moving forwards, and forward backwards facing
thrusters do not provide speed boost when moving sideways.

Furthermore, Speed boost is lost if the parts providing them are destroyed from damage.

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Chapter 2. Minimizing Weaknesses
Similar to World of Tanks and other vehicular combat games, each part of your robot can take damage and be
destroyed. However, unlike these games where the parts of the vehicle will remain on the vehicle until death, In
robocraft, if any part of your robot loses all connections to the rest of the it, that part of your robot will be instantly
destroyed. This happens regardless of whether or not you have dealt to the parts being severed.

Note that whenever a part if severed, the part of your robot with lower CPU is destroyed. If you are split at exactly in the
middle, then the part that is destroyed is randomly chosen between the two halves.

So, as a result, you want to avoid building slender structures to avoid as much severing or disconnecting of parts as
possible since that is free damage given away to your enemies.

What does this mean? Well if you want to avoid any thin sections from existing in your robot, the best logical shape is
one with equal dimensions from all angles. A sphere. However, a sphere is quite impractical to put weapons on and does
not necessarily serve to protect the weapons you do put onto them.

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So then, what can you do? You can use a shape that approximates a sphere. Cubes are popular, as are thick rectangular
prisms and other bloated shapes.

Any part that does not approximate the shape of the sphere can be seen as an
area of weakness. Where it is easier to split apart.

Another dimension to this is to consider where you are likely to be hit from. If you only expect to be hit from the front,
then perhaps an elongated shape would perhaps better suit your design as it would take far more hits to dig through
from that angle.

It should be noted however, that no matter how strong your robot’s body is, it is useless if it does not have weapons. So
weapons are absolutely a key consideration for the shaping of your robot.

In General, you do not want weapons that are blocked by each other, or parts of your
own robot.

Staggering your guns behind others is very important if you want to keep the optimal
fire rate, so often robots end up resembling a staircase.

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Remember, it is important to protect the block your gun is connected to. This block is called the mounting block. Your
gun may have 20k health, the mounting block only has 1.3k. Losing that block means you lose your gun since it severs
the gun from the rest of your bot.

Seen here, this builder attempts to protect the mounting block by extending
the frame outwards, providing more blocks in the way to tank the incoming
damage.

It should be noted that it isn’t always appropriate to approximate a sphere as

certain weapons such as mortars, benefit from a flatter shape. One can argue
that the downside of having a more fragile body is worth it for the benefit of
being able to shoot at closer targets.

Knowing how parts of a robot can be split is not only useful for building great robots, it is also useful for identifying
existing weak spots of an enemy’s robot. The weaker these spots are, the more beneficial it is for you to aim for them.

Final Chapter Comments:

Past a certain point in terms of thickness, an elongated bot may not be very vulnerable to splitting/severing simply
because it is unlikely that one will be able to focus fire at a singular spot. Some weapons do make it easier to achieve
this however, including Ions and Impalers.

It isn’t therefore always ideal to aim for weaker sections of the bot. Your priorities should be to as quickly incapacitate
the opponent as possible. Be it aiming for the guns, aiming for the gun mounts, or severing large chunks off, each
situation differs as each robot differs.

And likewise, while it is important to try to minimize weak points of your robot, other factors such as weapon placement
may take precedent.

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Chapter 3. Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy
Before we talk about redundancy, we should talk about just what additional guns and parts do for you.

For weapons, each and every one of them has a stat in the description called
“Max fire rate count”. Looking at the example of Plasma devastator, this means
if you have 4 plasma devastators, your maximum fire rate will be 20 shots per
second. When your guns can shoot and are existent and have the energy to
boot.

If you have less than the max fire rate count, less than 4 guns, you will shoot
slower. For plasmas, dramatically so. At 1 gun, you have 1/20th the fire rate of 4.

For Lasers, it is more linear.

In general, guns with less than 40 CPU will need 4 guns to achieve max fire rate. More than 40 but less than 200 CPU will
need 2 guns, and more than 200 CPU will only need 1.

So that’s it? Build a bot, stick 4 lasers on top and call it a day?

Well, not quite. While it may work in test mode, real enemies don’t just sit
there getting pummeled repeatedly without retaliation. They will shoot back.
Since you cannot actually shield the guns(bannable) from enemy fire, no
matter how you protect their gun mount, you will end up losing them as the
fight goes on.

With only 4 lasers, you lose one; you lose 1/4th of your damage. Lose two? You
are at half your DPS.

Let’s add 1 more laser to the mix. Now you have 5. Lose one, and you still have 4 remaining. You don’t lose any DPS.

Heck, let’s add a lot more.

With ten lasers, the enemies will need to strip six of your guns before you
start losing any DPS.

Heck, why stop there? Why not put twenty lasers? Thirty? ALL the lasers?

Hold on there. Lasers aren’t durable. Adding them won’t add to your
durability. In fact, they take away from the available CPU you can use to
beef up your robot. Past a certain point, you will start dying too fast, or
the lasers start falling off in pairs or worse because you simply don’t have
the armor to stand up to fire.

So how many weapons are enough weapons?

A rule of thumb is this. You can’t fight without guns. You can’t fight without health. You can’t fight without movement.
So you need a balance of all three. Have as many guns as you need such that by the time you are losing DPS, you are
close to death anyways. Depending on the weapon, this varies greatly. Smaller guns have lower health, so you’d need
more.

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Depending on your agility, the number also varies greatly. If you are so agile that most enemies cannot hit you anyways,
you can get away with less. This is why drones can get away with a bit more than a handful of guns.

Another caveat to this is the energy consumption of the guns. Some guns take forever to deplete your energy(blasters).
Some guns drain your energy almost instantly(Plasmas). It may be beneficial for you if you have enough redundancy to
fully drain your energy at full fire rate. For the former, you’ll need a lot of them if they are your primary source of
damage. For the latter, you may only need one or two redundant guns on top of the minimum since it is less likely for
the enemies to remove your guns fast enough. After all, there is no point in having 10 plasmas remaining if you are out
of energy.

Now onto movement redundancy.

Here, there isn’t always specific number of movement parts that are
required to move your robot optimally. Hover blades, Rotors, Wings, and
Helium all have a specific amount of mass it they each can carry. You can
check the mass of your robot on the top right of the screen, and the specific
carry weight for each part on the descriptions.

For hovers, going over the carry weight reduces your acceleration and hover
height.

For Rotors and Wings, it may prevent you from flying altogether, on top of the same issues hover blades present.

Some other movement parts may not have a defined limit of carry weight, carry weight would impact their performance.
Skis(multiples of which do not provide you with better stats), Thrusters, Sprinter legs, and Insect legs are examples of
such.

So why have redundant movements? Most movement parts cannot be concealed, cannot be protected from direct hits.
Losing such will reduce the carry capacity of your robot and may make them over weight. Losing wings before losing
armor will result in your plane flying more sluggishly, or worse, not fly at all as your remaining wings are then
overburdened.

Each movement part has different quirks with regards to redundancy. So I’ll explain here.

Wheels. These absolutely need redundancy since losing the wrong half of them can result in your
robot being unable to drive. Good thing is, smaller wheels can be encased fully in armor making
losing them less likely.

Tank tracks. These are durable parts so not only is losing them less likely, but having more of them
does not significantly negatively impact your robot’s durability.

It is a good idea to have more than 2 for redundancy so you can retain control. Also good idea to
avoid this movement altogether due to buggy nature and horrendous camera control scheme.

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 Mech legs. Durable but massive targets. Having redundant ones is a good idea, but since your mech
can move perfectly fine with only one, it isn’t as crucial. Back up movement(hovers) is advisable since it
would be low CPU and additional mech legs take so much space.

Sprinter legs. Fragile and massive in size. Redundancy is absolutely a good idea if you wish to be on
the front lines. This is especially so since being reduced to one leg will result in a significant penalty to
your movement speed.

Again, back up movement such as hovers is advisable since sprinter legs take up so much space.

Insect legs. These are buggy(Pun not intended). Losing a significant number of them may result in the
loss of control. Redundancy is heavily advised, however avoiding this movement altogether is also
advised.

Skis. Redundancy isn’t too important since these are usually placed at the bottom, well hidden, and
usually fairly well protected. Just have as many as you need to be stable. Also just avoid altogether if
you wish to win games.

Hover blades. While these have carry weight limit, hover blades are so tolerant to loss in other hover
blades and that they can be completely encased easily, that redundancy is absolutely unnecessary.
Especially since you are bound to include numerous hovers in a robot anyways.

Drones. Redundancy is very important. Thrusters and rudders are low health, and
loss of them will result in significant impact of your drone’s behavior.

It is absolutely important to have redundant parts.

Rotors. One rotor cannot turn. So it is important to have more than 2 rotors such that when you lose
one, you can still turn. Luckily, Rotor carry mass is pretty lenient. Going over isn’t too bad, so having a
few rotors is usually good enough.

Wings. Namely planes. These are fairly large targets and is absolutely necessary for you to keep alive
so you can be agile or remain flying. Redundancy is very important for planes. Most decent ones
have 10 wings at a minimum.

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Chapter 4. Smart Fire Mechanic and Control Scheme
In Robocraft, guns can block one another. Smart Fire mechanic was introduced to make it more lenient for builders so
they do not need to build the most heinously tall staircase gunbeds.

What is smart fire? When a gun is blocked, they do not fire. When a gun cannot shoot at the target angle, they do not
fire. Simple right?

Sort of. Lasers and Rails suffer significant penalties when smart fire is active, that is when guns are unable to fire. These
shoot significantly slower than before.

Front Lasers, the variant not the position. See image on right.

These specific variant of lasers do NOT have Any smart fire

mechanic whatsoever. If they cannot get the angle on the
target, they will still shoot, wasting tremendous amount of DPS. If for example you have 4 Top laser variants that can
shoot at the target and 3 front that cannot, your actual DPS will be cut by 3/7th simply because 3 of those guns that do
fire will shoot at nothing. Adding onto energy cost of those shots and it becomes abundantly clear that you do not want
to use front variant lasers if you are ever going to shoot at targets that are not in the front.

Certain weapons do not suffer any penalties from smart fire whatsoever. This includes Nanos, Plasma(sort of), and
Protoseekers(abv. PSK). This means that yes, you can have 4 nanos behind your robot that cannot shoot forwards and
still count towards the max fire rate.

Relating to Smart Fire mechanic, control schemes are an important topic.

Keyboard controls means your robot will turn only when you press A and D. Movement parts that are usually played on
this are Wheels, Keyboard Drones and Planes.

Camera controls means your mouse will control your robot’s directional movements.

With Camera controls, Hovers, Mechs, Sprinters, Rotors, Thrusters and

Wings will turn into the direction of the mouse, if possible. Hovers, Mechs,
Spritners, Rotors and Thrusters can Strafe.

Camera Relative tilt will, if applicable, pitch/tilt your robot based on where
you aim. Look down point down so to speak. Rotors, Vertical thrusters and
Wings/rudders are compatible with this option.

Tanks turn to face camera is required if you want tank tracks to always face where you are aiming. If left blank, tank
tracks will only turn to face camera when you move.

Sideways driving applies to Cruisers and Tank tracks. Enabling this means A and D will drive the robot left or right from
the direction of the camera.

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Generally speaking, Robots with camera controls are more capable to those that are not controlled in such ways or
cannot be controlled well in such ways.

Hovers, Sprinters, Mechs, Drones, Copters and Insects are typically played with Camera controls.

Doing so allows you to effectively use side mounted weapons and far more compact gun
placements since your enemies are almost always directly in front of you.

Further, all of the above allows for strafing, which grants you with superior agility for dodging
enemies and abilities.

A caveat to note is that top variant weapons when mounted in the

front has difficulty aiming directly forwards at the horizon. The reason
for this is to avoid gimbal lock. These guns have to sweep in an arc if
you were to aim left to right. This is made especially worse if you are
in camera controls since your enemies on the same elevation as you
will likely always be in straight ahead, making it very difficult to aim
for those guns.

To avoid this, it just so happens that Front variant lasers are excellent
at doing this exact thing. The downside of them having no smart fire
mechanic as mentioned earlier is negated by the fact that you will almost always be pointing at the enemies anyways.

Certain movements do not perform well with camera controls. Wings, Wheels, and arguably tank tracks fit in this
category. Use with caution.

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Chapter 5. Weapon Choices
Talking about weapons in robocraft is pointless without first getting an absolutely crucial resource in combat: Energy.

Notice how the low energy cost weapons such as laser wasps, rail piercers, tesla slicers, nano binders, etc all have
relatively low DPS compared to the high energy consuming counterparts. This means by expending this energy resource,
you are increasing your DPS substantially.

This gain however is temporary. The moment your energy runs out, your DPS will actually fall below that of the lower
energy cost weapons mentioned earlier. This is because in most of these cases, the lower energy consuming weapons
have higher, often significantly higher efficiency in terms of damage per energy spent. While your energy hungry
weapons struggle to keep up the fire rate, your more energy efficient weapons are more than happy to keep chugging
along, tossing more lead down range.

So what does all of this mean for you as a builder?

Being constantly high in energy is not good since you aren’t taking advantage of the boosted DPS from expending it.

Being constantly depleted in energy is also not good since you aren’t achieving the maximum DPS capable for your
weapon.

It means that ideally, if you can help it, you should always carry a weapon that depletes your energy throughout the
duration of a fight, and a weapon that can sustain decent DPS until your death. What these weapons are greatly
depends on your robot.

If you are extremely durable, chances are you can be in a fight long enough to deplete your energy bar with small lasers
such as blasters while still be able to sustain decent DPS at low energy.

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If you are extremely fragile, then chances are you’ll only peek in and out of the fight for a second or two, and so perhaps
a weapon like plasma devastator would be appropriate. While you won’t have anything to sustain DPS at low energy,
sustained DPS isn’t going to be a thing for you anyways since you cannot handle any return fire.

So which weapons do I choose? There are so many!

Well, let’s start by removing the useless ones mentioned in an earlier chapter.. These are objectively vastly inferior to
other alternatives.

Going through them quickly,

All of the smaller than devastator plasmas are horrendously energy inefficient while providing no benefits over
devastators or goliathons. Avoid. All other weapons listed above simply do not do enough consistent damage to be
effective.

So, first thing to do is identify what type of robot you are going to use.

If you are on the ground, you are going to want to avoid missile launchers since you will not reliably maintain lock on any
target with any degree of competence. You may also want to avoid using Plasmas since it is far more difficult to aim and
hit targets when you do not have elevation advantage. One final weapon you may wish to avoid are teslas. These
generally benefit greatly from the ability to move in 3 axis. Something ground bots have difficulty doing.

Getting more specific, wheels struggle with Ions and indeed any large weapon since wheels have difficulty with camera
controls and therefore cannot side mount them. Hovers have quirks that need getting around to play with Mortar and
Aeroflak since neither can fire when above ground. You’ll need to either build a heavily overburdened hover that can
barely lift off the ground, or constantly hold the down key in combat.

If you are in the air, you are going to definitely avoid Mortar and Flak since you’ll never be able to use them. That is,
unless you can land and fight that way. You will also want to avoid the Ions since getting up close and personal for most
air bots typically is a bad idea. This varies however, if you have a sturdy ground mode. Rails, while counterintuitive, can
be used in the air to a fairly moderate degree. They do perform better if again, you have a decent ground mode.

Going into specifics, planes and drones generally do not have a ground mobility backup or mode, so it is inadvisable to
pursue any of the mentioned weapons that rely on such. Rotors make excellent movement for hybrid ground/air bots
and therefore can take advantage of all of the above.

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Chapter 6. Armor Choices
Now it is time to put some blocks down that will eventually becomes a robot you pilot.

Here are your choices:

Medium cubes (of all shapes). The cheapest cubes you can buy. So cheap that they are free.

These weigh 10kg each with 1350 health. They are ideal for movement parts that care a bit about
weight, but are not too CPU intensive to lift. Hovers, Rotors, Insects(for stability), and perhaps
Wings for example.

Heavy cubes. These weigh 100kg with 1620 health. Since they provide a bit more health than
Medium cubes, so any movement parts that do not care at all about weight should use exclusively
these. Wheels, Tank tracks, Mech legs, and Sprinter legs for example. Insect legs too if you don’t
care for stability or ability to perch.

Light cubes . These weigh a measly 0.3kg providing 675 health. You can see that their health is
absolutely very small compared to others as is their extremely light weight. If you wish to use these,
you better have a justification as to why you would want to sacrifice half your health. Builds that
heavily depend on the Force thrusters provide might want to use these. By keeping the weight low,
Force will impact your robot far more. Maybe Drones, maybe wings and Maybe Skis will want to use
these. It isn’t as clear cut since there is one more cube for those mentioned.

Compact cubes . These weigh 2kg each and provide an impressive 3000 Health, and importantly,
uses 3 CPU. 3000 health? That means these are the most durable cubes to build with right? Well…
Yes and no. While the cube individually is certainly significantly more durable than even the heavy
cube, it doesn’t mean you should strap this on a tank and expect to be just as durable. The catch is,
these cubes use 3 CPU each. So you effectively can only use 1/3rd the number of cubes as you would
a heavy cube, and since all of these cubes provide the same health boost each, you’ll also be gaining
1/3rd the health boost. What it does mean however is that your robot will be far smaller than any
other robot using a different cube. Being small is the key here. If your robot is already agile enough to be hard to hit,
you’ll want to use this so you are much smaller and therefore much more difficult to hit. Drones, Skis, Wings can use
these cubes since they are light weight and provide them with the benefit of reduced size to complement their agility.

And no, these are not armor. The former provides static buoyancy while the latter
is for decoration. Glass does provide you with similar stats to medium cubes, but
they lack health boost. Use sparingly if you wish to remain combat effective.

That is all of the cube armors you can use, but there are some other parts that are often used as armor as well.

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 Struts. Depending on the size and shape, these provide very high health in a singular part while
weighing half as much as a medium cube’s equivalent in size or CPU.

While you might be tempted to use these everywhere, remember that they do not provide health
boost, and since they have only 2 connection points, they may result in a more fragile robot simply by
severing parts of your robot. Use wisely. More on the use of struts in a later chapter, but for now,
just know that Struts can protect an important area remarkably well simply by sharing the huge
health pool with its entire surface. Any gun can kill a cube no matter how many other cubes are near it, in 1 shot. Struts
can survive more than 1 shot of many guns.

Ah, electroshields. When used right, these can provide your robot with impressive defense, and when used wrong, these
will be your downfall.

First, stats. Electroshields from the smallest unlettered shape to electroshield I, have 1856 health per CPU used. This
makes them more efficient health wise than even the heavy cubes. They however do not provide any health boost, so in
the long run vs a large heavy cube robot, they are not as durable.

Shapes J and K used to be megashields, parts of the highest tier and are enormous. These only provide 1350 health per
CPU and again, no health boost. Why do these shields in particular provide less health than the smaller versions? These
have multiple connections, making them far more difficult to fall off due to severing.

Generally speaking, electroshields provide a compact defense similar to struts, and so tend to favor robots that are agile
enough to take advantage of reduced size.

While electroshields used to regenerate independently from the rest of the robot, they do not any longer differ from any
other cube.

Movements that typically use these are Drones, Hovers, and Rotors. While it may be tempting, these are typically
wasted on the likes of Mechs, Tanks, Cars, etc that not only do not benefit from compact size, but typically have health
boosts that are far in excess of what is needed to offset the health of the electroshield.

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It should be noted that because electroshields are rather high
in CPU usage, they tend to slim down any robot you make. If
used too much, it can result in a very fragile robot indeed.

While it definitely looks aesthetic as all heck, it is not combat

worthy. Avoiding weak points as discussed in an earlier chapter
is still absolutely crucial.

Moreover, electroshields that are smaller than J shape by the

nature of being non-structural, meaning they do not hold any
two pieces together, means they only really benefit you if you are hit from the direction of the electro shields. If
someone flanks you or aims elsewhere, your electroshields are effectively completely wasted.

So, with many builds like the one on the left, you really absolutely must face the incoming at all
times so the electroshields will catch and be used.

There are some other uses for electroshields, but that is a discussion in a later chapter.

An important note is that the unlettered electroshields have a hitbox far smaller than what it
visually implies. The sides as depicted in the image do not have a hitbox. Only the middle bar can
be hit. All projectiles will pass right through the sides, making this electroshield not very useful
for protecting a larger area.

The existence of hitboxes means that we have another type of armor.

Cosmetic armor!

That’s right, robocraft isn’t entirely free to win. Well, mostly is, but you can use cosmetic items to enhance your combat
performance.

But how you might ask, how does an item with no health provide you with any benefits?

Well, if you have a need to protect a large area from a single hit, but would not like to spend a lot of CPU to envelop it,
having a cosmetic item that covers it can do that for you. They cost 1 CPU, or if under the cosmetic CPU limit(can be
increased by premium), free, they can essentially redirect a hit over a large area. But only one though, one per cosmetic
since it is destroyed when hit.

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Here is an example. If I was to use armor cubes to cover the wheels, it would cost me a fair bit of CPU. And depending on
the weapon, it may in fact be able to take only 1 hit anyways.

One thing to note however is that not all cosmetic parts have
hitboxes that are visually represented. The name banner for
example, only has a 1 block tall hitbox despite its 2 block tall visual.
To test other cosmetic parts, you’ll need to shoot at it in test mode
with a custom rig.

You may also get a friend in a custom match to test it for you, or if
lacking in friends, you can run two game clients separately with 1
being steam and 1 being standalone.

Final note regarding cosmetic armor. Damage Never, ever, under any circumstances disappear. Since cosmetic armor
doesn’t provide you with any health, you are not adding armor per se with it. You are instead expanding the coverage of
existing armor.

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Chapter 7. Primary Mobility Notes
Building with different movements has different needs. Each is unique, each has its advantages and disadvantages. This
chapter will touch on all movements going from the order as they appear in the inventory screen.

Wheels:

Wheels strictly a ground only movement with no ability to strafe, cannot turn on the spot, and have infinite carry
weight. Stick to heavy cubes as mentioned in an earlier chapter.

While the shape and size of wheels come in many different flavors, there are some building aspects that are common
amongst them.

First, the difference between Steering and

non steering wheels as shown on the left.

Steering wheels will “Steer” when A or D

are pressed. They steer your car. Makes
sense right?

The direction of turn will depend on where they

are relative to the center of your wheels. Not the
center of your mass.

If you have 6 wheels like demonstrated, the

center will be where the middle wheel is. And
since the game has to decide which direction the
middle one goes, it defaults to follow the front
wheels. So in 6 wheeled setups, if all wheels are
turning wheels, the front 4 wheels will turn in
unison and the rear pair will be opposite.

And yes, if you mixed in non-steering wheels in a way that contradicts logic following,
the game will have no idea what to do. But do note that non-steering wheels technically

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do turn as you press A or D, but only a tiny, tiny amount. The game considers them to be steering wheels, which would
explain the result to the right.

This opposite front-rear steering is necessary in order to turn the car if you wish to have
an all wheel steering setup. But don’t worry about it too much since this is done
automatically for you.

Non-steering wheels can be placed

Please do note that this imaginary center of wheels does Not change as your robot takes
damage. Losing the rear 2 wheels for example does not mean your middle 2 wheels will
reverse its direction of turn.

As you can see, the middle pair of wheels still behave in unison as the front pair even
after losing the rear wheels. When wheels are like this, your car will no longer be able to
steer since all wheels are pointing at the same direction. Your car will drive in diagonals
instead, and is effectively immobilized. Having non-steering wheels in the middle can
help reduce this risk.

In summary, wheels are not very lenient to loss. Losing specific wheels can cause your
robot to lose functionality, so it is paramount that you protect those wheels as best as you can, or provide as much
redundant wheels as you can.

Additionally, in terms of agility, more wheels do slightly increase acceleration on top of what speed boost provides. If
you want to decrease the turn radius, aim for all-wheel steering with narrower and shorter wheel base. Moving weight
further back can also assist with making tighter turns, however may reduce the stability and controllability of the car in
rougher terrain.

Wheels unlike many movement parts in game, do not provide any form of self righting assistance. This means wheels are
extremely prone to rollovers. While hover blades can alleviate this somewhat, they can slow
your car down by about 10-20MPH. The exact amount of speed penalty and how it works is
uncertain.

Other ways to reduce the chance of rollovers is by shaping your car body. A wider lower car is
less prone to rollovers, and a car with protruding parts higher up the body can help stop a
rollover in progress.

Since wheels are almost unanimously agreed for behaving terribly with camera controls, side mounted guns are
generally not a good idea. Facing enemies in close quarters constantly for optimal fire is unlikely, so top mounting
weapons is more optimal. Exceptions of this being nanos and psks since they do not suffer smart fire penalty, as
mentioned in an earlier chapter.

Weapons that suit cars play style in descending order of viability are Lasers, Rail Impaler, Gyro Mortar, Nanos, PSKs, and
Aeroflak.

As for CPU range, Laser car can be 1500-1625 CPU for higher DPS, or 2000 CPU for tank role, 1200-1500 CPU for Rail
Impaler, preferably with a power module and or laser backups, 1500-2000 CPU for Aeroflak and ~1625 CPU for

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everything else. In short, cars should not be too low of CPU since you are easy to hit, and are typically targeted first in a
fight. Exception being the rail impaler given that you can stay at long range near your base.

In terms of driving, you will undoubtedly notice that bridges and capture points may stop your car and you have to
struggle to get past them. This is an issue with all wheels and not entirely related to the ride height of your car. This
amongst other reasons is why wheels are regarded as a bad movement.

In terms of counters, your biggest threat comes from Mortars, Ions, and Teslas. These three weapons counter cars with
great efficiency. Mortars because you are stuck to the ground and cannot strafe to avoid. Ions because you are not agile
enough to keep your distance without running into terrain or other players reliably, and Teslas because you are stuck to
the ground with little option to avoid them short of spotting them first.

As for the particular size of wheels, the rule of thumb is that smaller wheels are for durability since you can encase them
better and have more redundancy, and larger wheels are for speed since
they provide far more speed boost per CPU.

Final note, wheel monsters have Six connection points. Seen as the blue
rectangles on the right. This makes these wheels extremely difficult to
sever since you would need to disconnect all six of those connection
points before they fall off. So more likely than not, these wheels die from
direct damage, or from a larger section of the car being cut in half.

When it comes to mobility, with enough thrusters and head start, wheels can climb near vertical terrain, although
difficult.

One tip in building to make your robot more compact is to hug the wheel’s build box as closely as possible like the red
prisms below.

Another approach for compactness is to build lower.

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Some wheels allow you to build lower than the image presented, experimenting is the only way to be sure.

Finally, if you do not know how to mount the non-monster wheels at all, follow this example. It isn’t the best, but it will
get the job done.

Just remember, the wider your wheel base, the less likely it is for you to lose pairs of wheels in one shot especially if you
do not know the more advanced techniques.

Suitable weapons include Lasers, Rails, Nanos, Flak, and Mortar.

Currently wheels suffer from imbalance of applied force if taken heavy amounts of damage without losing wheels
underneath. If you lose the armor on the left half of your car, the left half would be considerably lighter than the right
half due to the weight of heavy cubes. This results in your car heavily biasing towards turning right.

To counteract this, one may consider using thrusters on the sides so the remaining thrusters would counteract this
steering bias.

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Tank Tracks:

Tank tracks are fairly straight forward. While the sizes maybe fairly intimidating or confusing, just know this. The shape
and size of tank tracks, in effect, has makes little difference in the actual gameplay. The statistics/cpu do not vary
significantly, so it is absolutely advantageous to use smaller tank tracks as you can have greater redundancy, greater
ability to protect your tracks.

Tracks also have infinite carry mass so it is recommended that you use heavy cubes to build your tanks.

Mammoth tracks are absolutely huge and cost a whopping 125 CPU. This is why most tanks utilizing such have exposed
tracks, and usually only a handful of them.

Onto building, there isn’t too much to discuss here.

Tracks close together have difficulty turning.

They rotate slower the closer they are, but the
upside is that they can be protected better.

The distance of the outmost tracks determine the

turning rate, so tracks in between do not
matter. This is changed as you lose tracks.

Tracks in front of one another do not significantly impact the behavior of the tank. It does add
the needed redundancy.

Do note however, the larger tank tracks are very long. This forces your tank to not only be
long, but thin or slender. It can be a great weakness if you use larger tracks.

Tracks in the middle also do not significantly impact behavior

of tanks and does add redundancy.

The tracks are loss tolerant, so if you lose an outer track, the

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middle track will allow you to steer. Although slower since the outmost tracks are now closer together.

Know that the tank tracks have multiple connection points. It will not
fall off so long as you have one of these still connected to your robot.

Because of how many connections there are, tank tracks can be used
as a damage sink. Such a mechanic will be discussed in a later
chapter.

It may be worth considering to squeeze blocks wherever you can so you

can minimize the size of your tank.

Remember, the bigger the tank, the bigger a target you are.

While tank tracks do provide a speed boost, the amount is so low that it is inadvisable for you to spam tank tracks for
the purpose of speed.

Similarly, it is inadvisable for you to spam tank tracks for the purpose of health boost.

Since tank tracks have access to camera controls, side mounting guns is viable. As is using front mounts in conjunction
with camera controls. Tanks, like wheels, cannot strafe.

For tanks, “Tanks turn to face camera” means that even if you are not moving, the tank tracks will follow the direction of
the crosshair. Without it, the tank will only do so when you move.

“Sideways driving” means that by pressing Only A or D, your tank will move in the direction of left and right.

Pick whatever is comfortable for you.

There is a hitch however, a somewhat recent change to tank camera

controls means that anytime you face the rear of your tank, even if just
slightly, your controls will be reversed. W will move your tank backwards,
still forwards in the direction of the camera, but your tank may just reverse
to meet that instead of turning around.

So to avoid this, the only way is to avoid rotating your tank too quickly to
allow your tank to catch up to the camera.

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Weapons suiting tanks include Lasers, Rails, Flak, Mortar, and Nanos.

CPU to hit for is 1600 or above with heavy emphasis on durability and redundancy.

When it comes to mobility, tank tracks have extreme difficulty navigating terrain.

In terms of mounting, just utilize as much of those connection points as seems reasonable. There isn’t much else to it.

Suitable weapons include Lasers, Rails, Nanos, Flak, and Mortar.

Mech Legs:

Mech legs are durable movement parts that can strafe, turn on the spot, jump and crouch. They fill a vast variety of roles
due to their flexibility, variety of sizes, and ease of use.

If you wish to stay on the ground, it is recommended that you use mech leg colossus. These sit in the ideal
range of lower CPU, and great durability.

If you wish to fly however (with rotors), it is recommended that you use the smaller common mech legs.
These are light weight enough to not be a heavy burden on your rotors while providing a good way
to move on land to avoid the likes of flak or to use weapons such as rails, flak, and mortar.

One other reason to use smaller legs is for their reduced hitbox, allowing for the builder to protect
them with blocks.

Mech leg Titans are generally considered inefficient due to their immense size and immense CPU cost. That is not to say
they cannot be made to work, they certainly can. But know that you are going to be sacrificing a bit for it.

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While the base movement speed is certainly slow for Mechs, this has not stopped many from trying to improve it by
adding thrusters or in the image above, propellers. Your mileage will vary depending on your play style. More thrusters
you add, the less durable your mech will be due to CPU no longer spent on health.

When it comes to building a mech, there are a few archetypes to generally follow:

Body-on-leg design. These are usually general purpose mechs of

medium durability. Their bodies are mounted above the legs, and
provide an ideal shape for backup hover movements, More on that in
next chapter. However due to the exposed nature of those legs, they
can be vulnerable to being crippled by plasma or rails. Hence the
backup hovers. These typically use colossus mech legs

Body-over-leg design. These are built almost exclusively for tanking

damage for an extended period of time. They are simply more
efficient to do so since they protect their legs and do not generally
have or need backup hover movements. In order to better facilitate
wrapping around or in front of legs, these typically use smaller legs.

Flying Mechs. These will be touched on in more detail in the next

chapter, but for now, know that these and only these mechs utilize
medium cubes for body, and smallest legs for landing. The rotors can only
lift so much weight.

You might have noticed that Mechs tend to be fairly wide. This is due to the minimum
width of legs. As such, mechs can be prone to being split down the middle, especially from
Rail Impaler or really focused laser fire.

There are ways to prevent or alleviate this solution, and while I won’t go into depth on
how they work in this chapter, I will provide examples of two of the simplest methods.

Rod Forcing. This method is extremely simple to build. Simply

place rods directly between the mech legs and weave in edge
slopes in an alternating pattern as shown.

In effect, the rods will lose the hit box intersected by the edge
slopes, and are three distinct connections between the legs. The
result, is that the two legs are now extremely difficult to split
apart.

This is recommended for more durable mechs with > 40% health
boost as the smaller mechs may end up causing the connected
legs to share the damage taken.

Having trouble weaving the edge slopes? Try Scaffolding, mentioned just below.

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 Simple Triforcing. This method requires a technique called
Scaffolding. Which is to say, to lay down blocks so you later
delete and replace with prisms that face the right direction. More
on that shortly.

These are more suitable for smaller, lower health mechs as these
types of connections do risk the transfer of damage between the
legs nearly as much as rods do. However, these are less effective
than rods when it comes to direct hits as none of the hit boxes
are removed.

The choice is yours. Rod Forcing will work for most situations in higher health mechs or mech legs.

Scaffolding(grey):

And Voila. The basics of scaffolding. Why these work, and more in depth guide will be explained in a later chapter.

Some other notes about Mechs. They do not in particular care a lot about balance of weight, so it isn’t a horrendous
thing to build one where armor concentrates around the front.

Every single square on top of the mech leg outlined by the cyan lines are connection points. The smallest legs having 5
and more on larger ones. These behave just as the connection points of Tank tracks, only these are right next to one
another.

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Some common mistakes that should be avoided:

If you lose your leg, you also lose the gun. This is because the guns here are connected
directly and only to the legs themselves. Without the leg, the gun would be
disconnected to the rest of the robot.

This is usually resulted from frustration of

mounting the mech legs after the body has
already been built. The problem with this is
the lack of utilization of the connection
points, making the legs easier to be picked
off by damage to the body.

On the subject of mounting legs, if you have

a body already constructed, it might be frustrating to try to install legs
like other parts. This is because you would have to line up the legs to the
body, but also the height of the body must be perfectly tall enough to
meet the leg mounts.

To get around this, simply look up from underneath the body you’ve
made. The legs now can be placed with ease, and if the body of your
robot is too low, it will automatically be raised when you install the leg.

Too human like. You know the drill from the early chapter. Skinny
waist, skinny arms means they can easily be split apart from
incoming fire. Similarly, don’t build too tall, don’t build too wide for
the same reason.

Weapons suiting Mech legs include Laser, Rail, Ion(faster mech), Chain splitter/shredder, Flak, Mortar, and Nano

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Sprinter legs
These construct very similar to mech legs but are definitely different in some ways. I will be addressing some of the
differences so I do not repeat myself from the mech guide.

Sprinter legs have significantly less health as compared to mech legs. This means they
are less suitable for frontline robots. Instead, they are more suitable for rail (snipers),
and flankers (ions and tesla).

Moreover, the technique of connecting the legs with rods to prevent splitting may
not be as beneficial, at least with the same method as mech legs since it is far more
likely for excess damage from one leg to move to the other.

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So how do we fix this?
There are a few ways.

The simplest method is to use prism strips. This delays the damage spread
from one leg to the other, taking three blocks instead of one to spread from
one to the other.

Another method is to use a very high health item to directly attach to the legs.
This allows the excess damage to be absorbed by that item first then the other
leg. The example on the right uses an electroplate to absorb some of the
damage. This is by the way, what is called a damage sink.

Finally, keeping to rods, we can simply connect the legs with rods but
lengthening the connection to three blocks or more, by using prisms.

The example on the right will delay the transfer just as the first example, but
still taking advantage of the benefits of having rods removed hitboxes.

Another downside of having lower health on the legs means that you are simply more likely to lose them from hostile
fire. No matter how well built your sprinter is, the size of them means that you must face the inevitable.

This means that you will either use three sprinter legs and or include some form of a back up movement.

Speaking of back up movement, it will depend entirely on what blocks you chose to build your sprinter with, just like
mech legs. If you used heavy cubes, then the backup movements are wheels and tracks. If you used medium blocks, then
the backup movements are hovers or rotors.

While mech legs can be built in such a way that you block them from hostile fire, sprinters unfortunately it is more
difficult for sprinters to do the same since they are taller and their build boxes are a bit bigger than mech legs. So it is
not advised for you to build such a bot.

One trick that is available for medium blocks sprinters is what is called an infinite
jump sprinter. As a sprinter runs near max speed, when you jump forwards, your
speed will increase for a short period while in air from the jump, and eventually
you will land. What is supposed to happen is that your sprinter will come to a
complete stop for a short period of time before it can move again. A player by
the name of StealthRanger has discovered that by placing a hover just below the
mounting point of the sprinter legs, you can in fact remove the pause after
landing altogether, most of the time. This allows you to keep jumping indefinitely
effectively gaining far greater speed than normal. Thrusters aid in the reliability
of this as does keeping the weight of the sprinter low.

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For weapon choices, you want hard hitting weapons rather than weapons that deal damage over a prolonged period of
time. You can mount weapons in just about every angle since sprinters are agile and can use camera controls and strafe.
Commonly used weapons includes larger lasers, Ions, Tesla, Rails, Flak, Mortar, Nano, and previously Plasmas(no longer
recommended).

Insect legs.
This section will be left blank as building such a robot is highly ill advised due to bugs and balance. Until such a situation
ceases to exist, this guide will not provide information on this. Sorry.

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Skis
While in a pretty bad state due to balance, they are the fastest movement type in the game and do not quite suffer from
any serious bugs. Skis have a naturally blazingly fast base movement speed of 280mph, beating out Wings’ 210mph. This
means any speed boost you apply to skis, will give you that much more in return.

There is a downside however. They are a type of ground bot as the name might suggest. This means they will be easy
targets for the likes of mortar, plasma, and just about every weapon except from flak.

Speed and agility from camera controls is probably the Skis Only saving grace. If saved at all.

How do we build skis?

First of all, we need to address a Skis most vital ability that is gatekept by a gimmick/glitch in the physics system. Strafe.

That’s right, Skis cannot actually strafe if built to spec of what robocraft designers intended. Nowhere in game does it
even mention it is possible for skis to do so. Experienced builders or builders who have researched into this subject may
know the secret however.

See the thrusters that lie just below the skis?

Almost propping the skis up? This in effect allows
skis to strafe. No, not just the direction of
thrusters although you definitely would need
that, but the fact that the skis themselves are
not the lowest part of the bot. The skis need to be only partially touching the ground and not firmly planted there to
allow you to strafe. You can use bigger thrusters to accomplish this, of course placing them a bit higher so the lowest
hitbox of those thrusters will still be lower, but only slightly, than the skis. Remember, if you place them too low and the
skis do not make contact at all with the ground, then you will cease to move at the speed of skis, and instead move at
the speed of thrusters.

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The next thing to know is that you really only have two choices when it comes to skis. Light cubes or Compact cubes.
Light cubes will grant you a ski bot with greater health and more potential for thruster placements, however they will
yield you a far larger bot making you an easy target. Compact cubes will give you the most, well, compact ski bot, and
does synergize very well with the advantages of skis.

Steering vs non-steering? The only difference is that steering skis can allow you to steer without steering thrusters.

Thruster placements aren’t all that tricky when it comes to skis. Just make sure you have thrusters facing every direction
except up and down in every quadrant and you are good to go. It is typical for the forward and reverse thrusters to be
larger ones as they provide greatest speed while the side thrusters can use smaller ones for space saving since you do
not actually need to strafe that fast and smaller thrusters provide you with sufficient maneuverability.

Some downward thrusters can help, either holding down of shift key(downward movement), or camera controls with
Tilt enabled, with keeping the robot firmly planted on the ground to avoid rollovers. Skis being so fast on bumpy terrain
can be perilous otherwise as you may end up rolling across the map like a tumble weed.

Some upward thrusters when combined with camera controls + tilt can make your ski function as sort of a drone.
Allowing you to sort of fly across short or long distances.

An alternative to thrusters are propellers. They are more durable than thrusters, but provide less speed boost per CPU.
However they do provide thrust And speed boost in both directions, which if utilized, is actually more efficient than
thrusters. They are big and heavy however, so use them with care. They do not provide ideal replacement for thrusters
for directional thrusters because propellers unlike thrusters, have a windup delay. It may take a fraction of a second to
provide you with the thrust which may make your ski bot feel sluggish.

Another addition to consider is the width and height of your ski bot. The wider it is, the larger the target you are,
however, it does afford you with significant stability advantages. As one might imagine, it is harder to roll over with a
wider robot. Similarly, the shorter the ski bot, the more stable it will be on uneven terrain. Being short has the added
benefit of being a smaller target, however usually means you are going to be more fragile.

You may be tempted to add secondary movements to skis such as hovers, rudders, etc. Do not. They will greatly
negatively impact your skis top speed as the secondary movement’s top speed has priority and will override that of the
skis. Other movement types are simply too heavy or cumbersome to use effectively with skis as primary.

The exception to this are non-functional rudders/wings.

These do not provide thrust and therefore do not
impact the top speed. While they provide interesting
behavior when flying, their behavior isn’t perhaps the
most useful. Feel free to experiment.

Weapon choices? Go with light weight, high dps weapons, which basically limits skis to disintegrators, rails, and
nanos(good on every robot).

Chapter 8. Secondary Mobility

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Chapter 9. Damage Propagation

Chapter 10. Damage Models

Chapter 11. Introduction to Triforcing

Chapter 12. Weaves and their uses

Chapter 13. Rods

Chapter 14. Struts

Chapter 15. Triforcing Valley and the dangers of Triforcing

Chapter 16. Triforcing your weaknesses

Chapter 17. Damage Sinks

Chapter 18. Skeletal Concept

Chapter 19. Layering Concept

Chapter 20. Core Concept

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Chapter 21. Escape Module Concept

Chapter 22. Split Core Concept

Page 36