Overview
Need help navigating the loads of old info still around in robocraft? this is the place to be!
Intro
Currently in robocraft, many official sources or common reference areas (such as many of the popular guides) are months, closing in on years old. this guide is meant to help players navigate these still vital sources of information without becoming misinformed on important game mechanics.
The period of time I will be using for reference is the Tanks are rolling out update (Nov 14′)
New things
The following cubes did not exist:
Tracks
Helicopter blades
Mech legs
walker legs
Ion disruptors
Proto seekers
Nano disruptors
Lock-on missile lanchers
Aeroflak
every module
battle arena
the pit
single player
leagues
Mechanics/basic changes
Tiers
Instead of being determined through CPU (current), matchmaking was decided through a now-extinct function called robot ranking. Simply enough, every part (including armor) had a specific robot ranking. Your robot was put into the appropriate tier based on the sum of the robot ranking of the parts on your robot. There were 10 tiers. A very common strategy was to make a robot “on the edge” of a tier, where the ranking of the parts were on the highest end of a tier.
The most common way to discern a very old design is if there is a tier marked on the robot.
example: tank(T2)
drastic part functionality changes
while most parts have been affected over time, these parts are special because they used to be tiered (similar to how SMGs and plasmas are now), but are not currently.
Armor
Helium
Robots
Robots used to be only allowed one weapon type. However, diffrent tiers of the same kind of weapon were allowed.
when spotted, robots formerly were identified by the announcer with their weapon type and primary movement type. this classification could also be seen next to the icon for each player on the loading screen.
Robot functionality is based through a Pilot Seat. This pilot seat needed to be destroyed to destroy the robot. The “meta” for designing robots was based on defending the seat at all costs. This change makes many old robots obselete, as they now are defending a random point.
Robots did not possess power bars, but were only constrained by the firing rate of the weapon being used.
Every weapon type had their “optimal” weapon amount at 6. At 6 guns,
SMGs has their highest firing rate, which slowed down with more guns.Plasmas had this same effect.
weapon changes
SMG’s/lasers
A long time ago, smg’s were far and away the best weapon in the game. This was due to two factors:
1. when the reticle had slipped all the way back to the center (when not shooting), SMGs were 100% accurate. In addition, SMGs had 0 falloff damage. On top of all of this SMGs were hitstun weapons, meaning that they instantaneously hit everything in their line of fire once the trigger was pulled. This led to SMGs being very effective as an AA gun, almost as effective as rails, the intended AA weapon.
2. SMGs at the time had little to no competition for the best short range weapon (this will be made more clear why later).
Plasmas
Plasmas fired all of their shots at once. The splash damage for plasmas also used to be able to go through armor, resulting in the popularization of “spaced armor”, where armor would intentionally be made wothout one layer touching another.
Rails
Rails used to hold one shot each. Once all of the shots were expended, they would be automatically reloaded. This reload time could be reduced if not all the shots were used, and the player manually reloaded.
rails were considered the “OP dumb weapons”, and the long nerfing cycle to which they have undergone started in full force here.
Movement and physics changes
Wheels
Wheels have stayed remarkably the same, so nothing really changed.
Hovers
Hovers used to be a more wild type of movement. They were much faster, and more affected by thrusters, and were incredibly effective and probably the best movement type. Currently they are air braked for stability.
alignment rectifiers
these used to be cubes that performed the action of the f key. When used, they would pop the robot up, from the position of the rectifier, hopefully flipping it over. There were no guarantees that they would work as intended.
thrusters and planes
Planes were formerly far different. Now, all aircraft have to be built with defenses for the large suite of AA weapons, such as flak and LOML, planes used to be about all speed, with secondary defenses doing the job for whatever happened. there used to be no cap on altitude of robots, or the speed of robots. Bombers and interceptors could reliably have fights so far up they were unhittable by ground forces, and be so fast so that they could creat intense dogfights.
“cheese builds”
just as the tesseract is ever present, many builds were possible without the limits currently in place. the most common was the thruster stick, a bot equipped with powerful thrusters, coated in plates, and with 2 rudders hidden away, which could fully guide the thruster stick like any plane. Another build, known as the UWD, was a large square of bricks and thrusters, which was able to move at incredible speeds. these 2 builds led to the wacky air physics we have today.
armor and defense changes
armor and defense used to be all about damage redirection. Formerly, if damage spread out to a “dead end” in the robot, that damage would be nullified. This means that many old bots had radical armor designs that were incredibly tanky, despite being strings of cubes. While this is changed, “triforcing” the moniker for describing all of the methods to avoid damage, still exists in some different ways.
electroplates used to be a niche item for robots that couldn’t stand any weight being added to them, such as flyers.
Armor was generally less effective, resulting in more “bursty” matches.
conclusion+ additional resources
There are a few places that I would recommend for those curious about what the game used to be like:
The robocraft forum thread “Landships: a new class of robots” is chock full of information about how robocraft worked mechanically every step of the way from what I talked about here to the current meta.
Try reading old guides by Sperzieb00n, a player who made guides on several robots that broke the limits to the highest potential that they were able to.
Bobdabiscuit is another player, who invented the UWD build, as well as a few other silly things. He still is sort of active, so you can hunt down afew of his recent forum posts to.
There are still a few veteran players on the forums, but they are few and far between.
Thanks for reading!