Lulzer

My best design has a single long chain of springs for the fuel, but in previous designs I used 2 chains and whenever I had my drone drift I would fix it by tweaking the strength of a spring on the opposite side. It results in your drone going off-center and then returning, which loses you a few milliseconds that can cost you when you get to the top 10 or 20. Getting your balanced design to fly straight takes some trial and error unfortunately, and it gets worse once you add shotguns as your starter. I've heard @Markus say that Unity doesn't resolve some calculations with perfect precision, so this drift might be because of that. If it is, it might not be fixable. Final tip, don't use a button. Try using the empty/full keystrokes on fuel tanks (at least 2) instead.

Thanks, both of you! Made 1st in Piesces with the shotgun starter 😁 How would the magnets work, make a block of magnets and crank the repel up? Maybe some heavy blocks so it's heavier than the drone? And what's the advantage over shotguns? As far as I can tell with shotguns I get to at least 150m/s pretty much instantly (0.10ms).

The racing meta seems to favor afterburners, which are operational at 150m/s. So what methods do you use to get there? Thrusters And lots of them. They're reliable and only gradually flex your drone. Coupled with a speed sensor you can release them at exactly 150m/s. Jump Thrusters Wobbly af, but potentially quicker than regular thrusters. If you're dragging your fuel with springs you can accelerate a smaller part of your drone carrying your afterburners for the jump thrusters to get them up to speed. Weapons I've seen people mention them (shotgun with recoil perks?) but I haven't gotten them to work reliably. They tend to move my drones off center. Are there any better ways? What do you use?

Problem is a bunch of drones will have to be scrapped. The game is on steam already. Yes, it's alpha, but I'm not sure they want to introduce a game-changing mechanic now. Their time might be better spent polishing and building new features. For example, I'd take the racing mode over any improvent in the physics.

Hadn't thought of that. Tried it out and it works great in small scale; very tight cornering. I can't scale it though. The motor hinge breaks off with too many afterburners. I managed to squeeze in 5 of them before everything wobbles the hell apart. I tried running 2 hinges per side to distribute the load but you can't rotate things seamlessly with 2 centers. Have you managed to scale it? @corona_wind

Will play devil's advocate. - Average: Sounds like the strongest metric if you could get it to work. Problem is the limited pool of drones that will have played X number of matches. Part availability being what it is, I haven't fought with the same drone more than 10 or 15 times, and many of those were in single player where I keep a "strong" (dumb and big) drone to progress through the galaxy quickly. Plus, you run into a Theseus ship kind of thing pretty quickly. How many modifications are allowed on the same drone before you need to reset its score? If I swap out a single part, is it still the same drone? What if I change the inputs and outputs? This is handled right now in some way, How is the game tracking a drone that goes through modifications, big and small, over time? - Time to Victory: Last second wins you argue are low-score because it comes down to a bit of luck as to where the drones are when the ring shrinks, right? Insta wins would also be low score because it implies you wrecked the other drone, maybe you dodged a blind pusher - that's 3 thrusters and a detector, not exactly high tech stuff. So the high score would fall somewhere in the middle, say between 20 to 45 seconds. That's not a bad metric, if a little arbitrary. - Damage dealt: Entire matches go by without visible damage. Also, how would part destruction that is self-inflicted or because of jiggly physics contribute to the showing score? Question for the devs: in sumo mode, parts exploding happen because a single collision exceeds an HP threshold or is there cumulative damage applied to each part? And yeah, change the factor enough and you make previous scores obsolete. You can just wipe them, too. It's early access after all.

You mean if you build a small drone to beat a specific drone? Maybe. Unlikely. There's just no way to get a hundred-part spinner with basic center-seeking out of the arena with a thirty-parts or less drone. But you build whatever you like under thirty parts and I'll pit it against that dumb spinner you see in my OP (and that particular spinner is under sixty parts). Will post results.

The problem with sumo is that often the dumb, big drone will win over the small, clever design. There's no incentive to build a compact, well-thought out drone using fewer parts because mass is a huge factor in a drone's ability to remain inside the ring. Constraining a drone's participation to a 'weight' class (number of parts) would open the field for a greater variety of drone designs. EDIT: A minimum number of parts would also prevent things like this. What exactly is the criteria for the drones that are drawn as opponents in a tournament? What about those selected to 'guard' a planet in exploration mode?

There's a logic part to interrupt signal, which would prevent your sub-drones from sending output to the other sub-drones and main drone.

There's also the cooling and heating parts which don't see much use as far as I know. If you're having heat problems, try the cooling part. There's even a thermometer so you can automate it. EDIT: You can literally go through the planet's core if you keep a single cooling part running.

I agree with Baka Red but I feel the same way about the gameplay. This game is currently an awesome outlet for that building itch we all seem to share but the gameplay lacks something. Perhaps variety in planets and objectives will help, but we're still missing a strong incentive to keep roaming galaxy after galaxy (other than resources for weapons, which runs out quick). Maybe parts shouldn't be free? Some kind of currency could be used to have a cost for parts so that you're more limited in what kind of drones you can build, forcing you to get creative with your starter blocks. As you progress you accumulate more currency, buy more blocks, sell older blocks you don't use for half price. This would also mean you might be able to download a drone built by another player but not have the parts to actually build and use it. I remember playing Robocraft a few years ago. You had basic blocks that were unlimited and free but if you wanted better stuff you needed to buy them. The pool of parts available to you were shared among all of your builds. If Nimbatus went that route it would also mean that you couldn't have dozens of drones in your 'garage'; you would need to dismantle one to create another, and actual compact, well-designed drones would be an advantage. Players would seek to emulate them. Soon there would be more defined drone builds and finding something outside the norm would be a huge advantage to the designer.

This would be really useful. The functionality is already there with the My Drones and Downloaded tabs. Just add more, color-coded tabs.

TAGs are a wonderful way to remember what you made, especially if you come back to an older bot it's easy to get lost in large builds. Having those TAGs show up outside of the part's UI would make it even easier. So for example, you tag your W thrusters as "Forward", and on the left of your screen (with the TAG toggled) you see a list of your tags. If you click on the tag, it highlights the parts that share the same name or key event. Or you could do it blueprint style, with the word you used written on the margins of your drone with a line pointing at what part it is assigned. Here's an example of what I mean.