Overview
In my last guide a commenter asked me for bot building advice or to link a guide. I play my best as a fast maneuverable bot, so here I will make a guide to hovercraft principles and walk players through making a simple but effective design I use myself.
Introduction
In my last guide, one of the commenters requested I link to a guide on building bots for new players. While I haven’t spent a lot of time browsing build guides, something I’ve noticed is that many of them are for players with a lot of CPU, or only focus on a very specific bot design, or even talk about a design that no longer works as well after the Epic Loot expansion.
This guide aims to walk players through building a bot that requires balance to keep control, which will be important if they ever want to build flying bots, as well as discuss some general building principles for any bot along the way. The ideas in this guide should apply to most robots, not just hovercraft. At the end will be a section on other movement types and some build tips for those as well.
This guide won’t make a pretty bot. It is literally a flying box. However, it will teach the techniques necessary to build an effective hoverbot and most principles also apply to flying robots as well. This bot will work and in fact by very effective in combat, especially once a player has enough CPU to spare to add Electroshields to the sides. From here players are free to try out new shapes and designs, but this is a good start for only 515 CPU.
Step 1: Propulsion
When first starting a bot design, you want to decide the bot’s propulsion. In this tutorial the steps of making a hoverbot will be detailed, but I will also list other movement types and how they might be different at the end of each section.
Most bots start with adding their propulsion and building the rest of the bot around it. If your ability to move is taken out chances are very high you are basically dead already and just waiting for the inevitable. This is especially true of hover bots and any flying bot, as they lose control more easily than most. Too many lost wings or rotors will send a flying bot into a crash landing, losing hover blades will make a hover bot tend to spin out, and so on.
Therefore, propulsion goes either under the rest of the bot if it’s wheels or treds, or in the cast of a hoverbox, the center. The underside of the bot having weight helps a hover maintain stability, especialy if it counterbalances guns that go on top. Any bot benefits from a heavier underside however, as this makes it more difficult for them to be flipped over. Pressing F will flip them back in a match but this takes several seconds and doesn’t allow firing while being flipped back, which leaves a bot vulnerable for about 3 seconds for enemies to attack freely.
This is the start of my Hoverbox. Start with a line of 3 cubes, place another cube above and below on each end forming an H, and place hoverblades on the upper and lower cubes evenly on both sides. All hover blades can stack directly above and below one another and you can forgo the lower two if you wish, or even just place four hovers, one on each side of the two cubes sticking up. The reason for this is the hoverblades being near the top of a bot also helps it keep stability, therefore it is advised if you want to save on hover blades you avoid putting them lower. You could also just put them on that center line and not even build the upper and lower cubes. Picture has the lower two cubes not present, leaving the hovers on the center line with another set above them.
The hover blades pictured are Hover Blade Thunder, Squall blades can also be used. This is a guide ment for lower level players so I’m sticking to Green rarity gear.
Step 2: Thrusters
Placing thrusters is optional, but can help considerably with accelerating from a standstill. Place Green rarity thrusters in the small hole between the raised blocks we added earlier for the hoverblades. The reason for this is that this point will be the exact center of the bot. If thrusters are unbalanced, they will tend to make a robot spin rather than actually go the direction you want. Place another thruster below this one on the underside of the same block.
Larger thrusters could be used on each end… however, the armor would have to go around them in that case, extending the length of the bot. Also, if an enemy blows one off the bot will try to turn as you move forward, forcing you to fight it to go straight. Even the big 1,600 CPU bot I use in ranked matches sticks to Lynx thrusters in the exact center to keep maneuverability until they actually destroy my propulsion.
If you build a bot with wheels this changes a bit… thrusters over and to the sides of the wheels won’t matter as much since pushing it into the ground won’t matter. Tank treads get no real use out of thrusters, being so heavy they tend to negate the extra push forward. The same goes for walker legs. Thrusters are absolutely necessary for aeroplane bots, providing the actual forward thrust to go with their wings. I strongly suggest armoring your wheels and tank treads, both to make the bot harder to flip being heavier on bottom and making it harder for enemies to blow them off. For wings, either armor below or extra wings is recommended if you don’t want to crash land every time a sniper breaths in your direction, which will happen a lot in the air.
Step 3: Armor Box
The armor box around the propulsion serves to both provide it a little bit of protection and, more importantly, provide a place to attach everything else you might want on a bot such as weapons, electroshields, radar dish… the list goes on.
We start by extending the thruster attachment points one block up and down. Unless being attacked by a flier, most damage comes from the sides. This means having the propulsion only attach at top and bottom makes damage less likely to spread to them for the first hit or two. This is a little different for tank treeds and wheels, where your bot is low to the ground and so likely to take a lot of hits on the top. The same goes for flying bots that are most likely to take shots from beneath. But for hovers the majority of damage comes from the sides, so we will build to expect that.
Notice the slopped blocks beneath the thruster. This is done for two reasons. One, a Panther thruster, unlike a Lynx, extends slightly into the block above it… normal cubes cannot actually be used here. Second, even if I used a smaller Lynx thruster, the main slowdown for a hover bot is weight. Slopped blocks have only slightly less HP but half the weight of a Cube, in exchange for only attaching on 4 sides instead of all 6. Cubes disconnected from a bot fall off rather than absorbing more damage so this can be… bad, if you aren’t careful in how you design a bot. However, it can also control the direction of damage spread, which is why when making the side armor we will use these again so the propulsion is still only connected at top and bottom of the bot.
Here we see the side armor. The brown blocks will be deleted after the sloped blocks are built, but you need them to attach the sloped blocks initially due to how cubes can and cannot be rotated in the build engine. They will still be intact once the brown blocks are deleted because of the grey cubes at each end attaching to their sides. This is the basic build technique of “Triforcing”, a method of controling damage spread as well as making a bot lighter. In this case we’re doing both with it. A Short Rod would be better here, being lighter for more HP, but at low levels you may not have any. The same goes for the sloped blocks under our thruster.
We place more sloped blocks around the hoverblades because the hoverblades also extend slightly into them, thus disallowing cubes. We have two reasons to build so small this is necessary… one, fewer cubes means a lighter bot. Two, despite taking 1 CPU each, armor cubes will take exponentially more CPU as the bot grows larger. Extending the bot in any direction will require multiple rows of them, which can quickly start to add up. Always start small and build out as needed, and if you don’t care about weight add one layer of armor at a time to see how it effects CPU.
This is the finished product. I replaced the armor slope blocks with rods because otherwise you would not be able to see them at all on the outside… correctly placed the bot should look like a solid surface. If you have armor rods I would suggest using them anyway, they are both considerably lighter and stronger than sloped armor blocks. If you notice the bot slowing down, it is likely too much weight is the culprit… the bot we just built has room to stack 3 at a time inside, so a total of 12 is possible. If you have CPU for it you can also extend the initial line of blocks you attach your hover blades to in order to fit more of them… adding more hovers is expensive CPU wise but is the best way to allow the bot to support more weight. At higher levels, this is how you will upgrade your hover box to support heavier and larger weapons, as well as higher level hover blades that require more space.
Step 4: Equipment
Now to add equipment. Weapons to start and helpful things like electroshields, radars, and so on second. My other guide has an in depth discussion of all weapon types… however, as a general rule, the faster the bot the better it makes use of shorter range weapons. Laser Wasps and Plasma fit better on a fast bot than on a slow bot which is better off chosing longer range weapons.
Here we see a set of 12 Plasma Pulsers on our Hoverbox. Adding slopes to either side allowed an extra row of them, attaching to the front and top is fine for a hover because it can easily turn to face enemies without having to move forward or back. For other bot designs where guns should go on top, as a general rule using armor blocks to provide extra height to rows of guns behind the front row can allow them to clear the front row of guns when taking shots at things. It may be worth placing some more guns on the back, so when the front takes damage the bot can turn away from an enemy and fire some more, but it depends a lot on CPU left over and the bot in question.
Conclusion
Hopefully this step by step guide will be helpful for newer players to get them into making their first good bots. Without anything added to it, the finished bot with weapons included only takes 515 CPU and will go around 170 MPH before overclock levels. My other guide goes into much more detail on individual weapons and movement systems and is also recommended for new players. To show how this design scales up, the picture below is a scaled up version of the same bot we just built. Larger hover blades, same Lynx thrusters, a Power Booster beneath, full high level Electroshields, and the purple rarity Plasma Launchers for massive burst damage. This fast bot served me well up to Diamond League Ranking, and uses basically the same design this guide took us through building, just scaled up in size to accomodate the bigger hover blades inside.
I switched to another design later that isn’t just a box, pictured below. Shields with an armor bar in front with mounted guns, providing additional protection and laser fire when the plasma launchers drain energy. It uses three high level electroshields due to its shape, which saved some CPU for creating the bar, and the armor bar has hover blades attached to its back bottom to help with the weight of it and provide much better stability before the bar gets heavily damaged. For a hover it’s got a good tank since the bar also takes a chunk of damage before enemies even hit the shields. Also, another plus is it isn’t a flying box, since people in the comments kept complaining I taught people to make a box… despite the fact the shape really did not matter to me, what mattered was the things the guide was trying to teach.
