NOTE: THIS GUIDE CONTAINS OPINIONS. NOT FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED OR MINMAXING TRYHARDS, BECAUSE BEING A MINMAXING TRYHARD ISN'T FUN.

People naturally get better at games by looking at other people that have beaten them. This is completely normal progression and as you fight progressively more formidable opponents, you iteratively learn strategies.

Like many skills in life, understanding advanced strategy in videogames is an iterative process and you must learn the concepts one at a time rather than all at once or in a random order.

When you queue for a match in robocraft, people get thrown together randomly. As a player who has not already learned advanced concepts from other games, this makes it very difficult to learn them from Robocraft.

The purpose of this guide is to cut through all the trial & error, randomness, and bullcrap to get you prospective Robocrafters the knowledge you need to make the right decisions.

The word "meta" is an acronym for the phrase "Most Effective Tactic Available". In most games, you need a certain level of skill to put a meta into practice properly. It is a tactic that you must fully understand to properly execute.

In Robocraft, the meta is a recipe for building a robot. Since it is a recipe it is very easy to follow even if you don't understand why you're doing what you're doing. This becomes even worse when getting a robot from the factory: The cake has been baked for you. All you need to do is eat it.

This is why meta bots are so popular. You don't need any skill to build or use them.

Skill is split 30/70 between fighting/building. No matter how good you are at fighting, you can't carry with a trash bot. On the other side of the coin you can still do well with a great bot even if this is your very first videogame.

Since there is no linear progression to learning the skills for building a powerful bot, people skip a lot of steps. They see other people with interesting bots or a bot that beats them and try to emulate it without really understanding why the other bot wins. When people do this, they create bots that are much less effective than they otherwise would be.

If you want to be great at the game, you need to fully understand battle tactics, building techniques & the fundamental principles for winning a fight. All three. Not just one.

The first important thing you need to understand when building a robot is the idea of winning a 1v1.

Let's say you see an opporunity to capture the enemy's near point while both teams are brawling at mid. You go over and start capping but an enemy bot respawns and attacks you right as you get onto the point.

If your bot wins the 1v1, then you delay that guy essentially forever since your bot is better and he can't stop you. You are now taking 2 enemy bots away from the main fight to come deal with you. That is easily going to give your team the upperhand in the main battle.

On the other hand, if you can't deal with that 1 guy coming to stop you... you die. Then that guy who respawned travels to the brawl at mid as usual and starts putting his DPS to work while you are still respawning, giving the enemy team a DPS advantage. This hurts your team's chances of winning the fight.

How to build a bot that wins 1v1s

For winning a 1v1, the most important concept for a prospective builder is redundancy. It may take you 30 seconds to kill an enemy bot... but it probably takes you 10 seconds to shoot all its guns off so it can't hurt you. Since this is the most effective way for you to win, then your enemies will try to do this too.

Make it as hard as possible for your enemy to remove your guns!

Accomplishing this is very simple. All you need to do is stick a whole lot of them onto your bot. If you go overboard with this strategy, you become something called a "gunbed" - a bot designed entirely around having as many guns as physically possible.

In most team-based games, players choose their characters on a role basis. The tank, the glass cannon, the medic, et cetera.

Sadly, Robocraft is played by kids who don't understand how to help their team nor does the matchmaker create teams of bots that can work together. Many people get super upset about this unfortunate situation, but you need to relax and work with it.

That brings us to our next concept: Versatility. When you can not rely on your teammates to fulfill any one role, you must do them all yourself.

All of the most skilled players use lots of lasers (aka SMGs). They do this because SMGs are by far the most versatile weapon in the game. They can hit any type of target at any range for respectable damage even when unboosted, and they grant the unique ability shared only by rails to shoot down drones in a couple shots if the user knows how to aim.

There are only two weapons that are good enough on their own to be worth using as the only weapon on your bot. They are SMGs and railguns, depending on your preferred engagement range & target.

SMGs for mid-close, Railguns for mid-long.

Using one weapon type on your bot gives you a large advantage over people that are forced to rely on multiple.

The reason? Redundancy! You can have many of your weapons destroyed but still keep maximum fire rate to continue decimating your opponent. You may destroy a couple of their ions and they only have flak left, unable to continue fighting because they're missing a redundant primary weapon.

Another example: You're a plane against an ion+flak bot. With your SMGs, you carefully sit on a hill and pick off the flak. With the flak destroyed, your opponent can't fight back because their primary weapon (ions) has no versatility. You're free to attack from whichever range you see fit and regenerate any damage.

Choosing a weapon for your robot is surprisingly easy. With one simple trick we can rule out the majority of weapons in the game as being unworthy of your time.

You take the damage per shot of the weapon and divide by the energy consumed per shot. The number you get afterwards is your "Damage Per Energy", abbreviated to DPE.


This number effectively represents how much damage you can do to your opponent before you run out of energy and have to disengage. If you have a low DPE weapon with high DPS, you can do a lot of damage in a short period of time but you can't stick around to finish the fight.

High DPS weapons are okay in a role-based team, but again since we don't have roles versatility is key. You can't rely on your allies to distract enemies while you move from one fight to the next.

As such, you want a weapon with enough DPE to keep yourself in the fight, but enough DPS to disarm your opponent before they do it to you.

Higher rarity weapons tend to have a higher DPS and lower DPE. Despite this, there are some "sweet spot" weapons that have the best balance between actually doing damage and not draining your energy bar. Since this is a concept guide and not a meta guide I'll let you figure these out by yourself.

Now that we've covered how to make a dangerous bot, you can roll out onto the battlefield and probably dominate any one opponent you come across. This is fine and dandy and will help your team reach victory but we can do far better now that you have a bot that can handle what you throw at it.

Winning a fight can be reduced down to basic counting skills. As you meet enemies, give them a mental threat level from 1 to 10. A bot with a mega rail on legs has a very low threat, (note that if a mega rail on legs is dangerous to you, your bot needs to be improved) while a gunbed has a very high threat. A bot that can beat you in a 1v1 reliably has a threat level of 10 and you should probably think about improving your bot.

This is how you're going to decide which order to engage enemies at and whether you can win a specific fight.

If all your enemies are low then you basically have free reign and can do whatever you want whenever you want without worrying about dying. If the enemy team is full of 9s then you must be careful and stay near your allies.

Now for the fun part where we apply the threat system to fights. For our example, we're going to use... that ice map with the cave and the ice.

An enemy snuck around to capture your near point. You, being the observant fellow you are, went and stopped them, handily winning the fight with your superior bot and securing the point. You go through the cave for a counter-attack on the enemy's near point, but oh no! an enemy comes in from the side and another comes in from the front! What do you do?

The most important concept for winning a fight when you're outnumbered is that winning a 1v1 followed up by another 1v1 right after is far easier than winning a 2v1.

Your goal is to turn the fight into a 1v1 and then another 1v1!

Add their threat levels together. If this number is larger than 10, you're going to lose the fight if you don't do something smart.

Your first job is to pick the most fragile bot. There's a glass cannon? Great, go for that one. Disable him first to cut the threat level you're dealing with down as quickly as possible. Disabling means to either shoot their guns off, or destroy their movement parts so they can't chase you. If you can not disable one of the bots before the other gets in range, you need to retreat. You can't win the fight no matter what, and being dead doesn't help your team.

As you go for your chosen target, you need to abuse terrain to prevent the other bot from shooting at you. Your goal is to turn a 2v1 into a 1v1 and then another 1v1.

After you take out your first target, you've hopefully not taken any damage from the more dangerous bot. Now, assess your threat level to him and compare his threat level to you. Are you too damaged? Is your threat lower than his? Are you equal?

You can now decide whether the best course is to contiunue fighting and possibly win the second fight, or retreat. During your assault on the other bot, you have put yourself in a position where it will be easy to finish your disabled target and flee in a matter of seconds.

If you decide to fight and win, then you can regenerate and push onto their capture point. This will draw their entire team to deal with you, giving your allies a guaranteed win at mid.

Once again, redundancy is key. If you have poor redundancy then you might have taken critical damage during your first fight. (not enough weapons left or you can't control your movement anymore)

If you've taken critical damage, then you're forced to either flee the 2nd fight or die. More redundancy = more chances to power through the enemy team even when you really shouldn't be able to.

Short chapters now. Engagement ranges are simple: Use your versatility to abuse their weakness.

Shoot off the ions from mid-range, then you can close and finish the job like usual. If the enemy has railguns and you have SMGs, you want to fight them at close range where you can just hold down your mouse button and they have to move their mouse more to aim at your guns. Chainguns are very slow to warm up so if you get the jump on a chaingun bot you're guaranteed a victory. Think about the engagement ranges of every weapon and how to abuse them.

Apply this when you're outnumbered and you'll avoid even more damage.

People in online games like to think they're clever. They like to flank. Of course, people on the other team also think they're clever and they move to flank and then the two flankers fight and it's all just a mess.

Flanking is a maneuver that can easily hurt your team if you do it in the wrong situations. Flank only when you are intending to pull an enemy away from a fight, beat him, and then pull a 2nd enemy away to give your team an advantage. As such, you should only harrass when you are guaranteed to win the 1v1 against whomever comes to stop you AND your help is not better used elsewhere.

By this point you should have a very powerful bot and you should know how to use it. After a couple engagements with you, your enemies will think fighting you is a guaranteed defeat. They'll avoid you. You'll have free reign.

This is called Intimidation. When you get to this point, whichever part of the map you're in will be avoided by the enemy team unless they can gank you. (which you shouldn't let happen because you understand how to track enemies' locations even when you can't see them & you're fast enough to evade them... right?)

Once you're at this point, I stop holding your hand and you start your way to protonium.

I hope the guide taught you something new!

Note that a lot of things I cover here are significantly less relevant in diamond+ league. You must use the meta to be competitive there and everybody understands these concepts so they don't give you an advantage anymore.

The bots you've seen as examples here are mine, you can find them on the factory if you're interested in helping me get that sweet CRF battles achievement.