Active Sumo Guidance

[corona_wind]

Passive "avoid the edge" and "hold the center" strategies dominate the ring right now, but once in a blue moon you'll find something in random rotation which seeks your drone and takes it out.  I call them active drones.

Their strategy is to avoid the opponent until they're in a good striking position.  They're persistent, difficult to confuse, stronger than radial designs, and eat "tricky" things alive.

Idle Behavior

Your drone shouldn't always move towards the target unless you feel like catching facefuls of magnets, bees, and rammers.  It shouldn't sit still either, or the bees will come to you.  Your drone must keep moving even when it's not busy attacking things.

Building vertically avoids rammers!  You can win an amazing amount of matches just by not being where anyone expected.  After that, the tilted direction indicator lets it circle the ring (orbiting is just aiming for something and missing) until the forward sensors trigger other conditions.

You can build a direction-follower you can turn off with NOR gates.  They're like inverters you can turn off;  X NOR FALSE = NOT(X) but X NOR TRUE = FALSE .  So they get wired up like ENGINE_R = DIR_L NOR TARGET.

Attack Behavior

When TARGET is triggered, the idle behavior turns off, letting other gates do something else.  Something like ENGINE_L = ENEMY_L AND TARGET.

TARGET itself can be simple -- TARGET_L OR TARGET_R -- or as complicated as you want, including things like "give up and move away after 12 seconds".

[Hex7]

I know this isn't really on-topic, but this is the first I'm realizing that parts can actually be put inside the hollow blocks on purpose. I kept thinking it was purely a bug that stuff would get stuck in those holes during a fight.

So thanks for that.

[corona_wind]

You can use them to double-secure something, like a spring block connecting from the core to "open space" inside a hollow block.  You can even build chains that way, hollow blocks secured to each other with springs, not really "connected" in game logic just kept together with forces and hitboxes.