Overview
This guide will show you how to use planes properly, how to avoid annoying AA weapons, and to get more out of your robocraft planes.
Aerofoils Update
As of the Aerofoils update, this guide may not be as helpful due to major gameplay changes to planes and plane physics. Some information may be helpful, but the meta is always changing.
This guide was made for pre-aerofoils planes, so just ignore the parts about rolling and maneuvers.
Plane structure should be helpful, though I have found some other plane body shapes that work.
Build/Design
The first step to a good plane is the overall design. Planes should be heavy, but not tanky. If the plane is too small, even with shields it will be sniped and killed instantly. If your plane is too heavy, it will be slow, it will be a big target, and in some cases won’t take off at all. A good plane would have a body at least 12 blocks in length, 5-7 in width, and around 3 in height.
The wings should be placed in the bottom or middle height layer of blocks near the center of lift (a little forward of the center of mass). A plane should have two layers of wings in the indicated spot, however, another set of wings can optionally be placed directly behind them. DO NOT put a second set of wings in the middle, as it can mess with balance and maneuverability.
For rudders, have a horizontal tail platform built at the very back of the plane’s body. Place one, two, or three rudders on top, and one on each side of the tail platform. Optionally, two horizontal rudders could be placed directly in front of the other horizontal rudders to help with stability, or to be used as emergency steering if the tail is shot off.
If you follow these instructions, your plane should be durable, stable, and agile for optimal performance in battle. I know a lot of this was obvious to some of you, but it still may have helped people inexperienced with planes in Robocraft.
Accessories
Thrusters can be a pain with the new CPU ‘balance’ update, so I have found ways to still have planes work, if not better than before. When placing thrusters on your plane, try to avoid using any on the bottom, as this space will be used for weapons, and reinforcements (optional). Place all thrusters spaced out along the length of the plane, putting them on the sides rather than the top or bottom of the plane. This will allow the plane to fly straight, mostly unaffected by thrusters. Use Cheetah or Puma thrusters in the back, and get weaker in tiers until you reach the front. The front thruster should be T2 or T3.
Propellors are probably the best source of thrust for planes in robocraft. While they are somewhat slower, they are a lot more powerful than thrusters. The main propellor, if you choose to use them, should be right on the nose of the plane. side thrusters follow on wing covers, or along the body, as long as they face forward. Something I like to do with side thrusters is attach them to the body of the plane with rods, it looks really cool and helps with balance all at the same time.
Weapons are one of the most important part of the plane (or any bot). Weapons I suggest for planes are plasma launchers (for a bomber), or smg (for a fighter or dive-bomber). Both can be used in the same plane, but it will benefit you to use one weapon, to increase weapon energy and firerate. For plasma bombers, try to use ravagers or devastators if you can fit or afford them. Plasma should be placed on the bottom of the plane, usually fitting 5 devastators on larger planes. This will allow you to shoot in all directions but up when flying straight for easily bombing enemy bots. For smg fighters, use lower tier guns (Blaster recommended). Place these nearer to the front of the plane, on the top and sides of the nose (try not to make it front-heavy), and on the bottom of wing covers if you have them. This will let you dogfight anything within your front line of view, like real fighter planes.
Shields are important to most ground units, but just aren’t that useful when building a plane. They take up a lot of space, and aeroflak’s explosion can go right through them. Shields are not effective on most aircraft, so include them if you want to, but I don’t recommend it.
Modules. These can be vital for planes to escape danger or defend themselves. Modules should be well-hidden, and placed near the center of the plane, as they weigh a lot and make up a lot of a plane’s health. Make sure you use the correct types of modules, as some are completely useless to planes. Ghost is good for stealth bombers and scouts, Disc Shield is good for deflecting flak and snipers (the plane’s arch-enemy), Power is good for plasma bombers, as continuous fire drains energy very quickly, EMP is ok, if you want to disarm enemies (if you can get close enough), and Blink is extremely useful for getting in and out of battle very quickly, as planes often can’t stay in a heated battle longer than a minute.
Aesthetics don’t matter as long as they are symmetrical or placed in the center of the plane…
Tactics
Now that your plane is complete and ready to fly, test it a few times to see if it would even fly well enough to go to battle with. Once your plane is confirmed flightworthy, there are some basic dogfighting tactics and maneuvers that could potentially save you in battle.
Maneuvers and tricks can be used to fool snipers if done right. Some basic ones that can help you are as follows: The Immelmann, a half-loop and half-aileron roll, can help to turn around to heal or retreat while evading enemy fire. Basically, flip upside down, and then ‘barrel roll’ halfway to right yourself. You will be travelling roughly in the opposite direciton, while confusing your foes.
Faking a Dive: As the name says, you can fake a dive, and stay low to avoid snipers and flak from the other side of the map. Be careful, though; you don’t want to run into a psk bot or shotgunner or it will be the end of you. Stay at your half of the map a lot, so you can retreat to the shield, and have snipers and defense covering you while you heal.
Analyze your opponent. When choosing a target, make sure to scope onto them and analyze their weapons. Planes have many weaknesses, such as flak, snipers, and loml (avoidable with ghost module). Do not attempt to fight tanky ground units. Like the spy in TF2, pick off individual bots that stray from the group. Always go for bots missing health, they won’t fight back as harshly, and will not be able to escape you.
Stay low. If there are a lot of AA bots, stay as low as possible, or have some sort of cover. Be able to hide behind a wall, mountain, etc. at all times. If you go high, smg and plasma can’t reach you, but flak has no gravity, and can hit you from across the map. Staying high is a good idea at times, but stay nearer to the edge of the map when advancing towards the enemy base.
How To Airplane
As a person who primarily uses planes, I think that they are becoming more and more underpowered with each update. Hopefully, with this new information, others can make planes as good or better than I, so that planes can become more powerful in the future. As the game has updated, they add more and more legendaries, each with the ability to take out planes easily (shotgun and shredder can be effective against dive bombers). With planes, we as robocraft players can bring back skill to the game, we can bring back the power of planes, we can make robocraft great again! (bad trump joke #32048382382). Through this guide, hopefully all players can learn something new about planes, and how they can be used to destroy people with skill, without paying to play or using legendary weapons. Hopefully you all learned something new about planes, how to build them, their uses in battle, and how they can make a difference. You can find me in-game as Tombomb474.
Update Ideas
While I know that FreeJam or the other devs might not see this, I thought I might share some update ideas that I, and others I have met in-game, have come up with.
1. Thruster and/or helium limit
The purpose of this update is to take most drones out of the sky. There would be a 10 thruster limit, or a 10 helium limit, so the required materials for a drone would be ultimately removed in the ‘edit robot’ mode.
2. Buff wing/rudder health
As all plane users know, planes are nothing but a floating sheet of paper to snipers and flak. If the initial health or shields of plane parts were buffed, it would balance out the playing field when using planes.
3. Nerf flak
As of Hallowfest 2016, flak cannons (or as I call them aimbot guns), have been altered to give a damage multiplier. This is obviously an issue to slow-moving bombers. If you took out the multiplier part of the halloween flak modification, flak guns would do 1/2 of what they used to do, giving the bombers a chance.
4. Plane-specific weapon
There have been so many weapons released in the past year, most of them legendary weapons that are a hassle to use on planes. It would be awesome to have plane weapons such as bombs, unguided rockets, laser beams (constant fire, low dmg), or gunner turrets (basically a mini-shredder) added to the game in the future.
5. Fix the currency system
This one was kind of obvious to a lot of veterans out there. Crates are just not worth as much as cold hard robits. While people do get lucky, you often end up with <4,000 robits per protonium crate (non-premium). It would be a great addition, or rather subtraction, to bring back the GC and RP system to the game.