Robocraft: Rise and Fall of Fliers
As mentioned in a previous post, the current meta then was flier but what I forgot to mention was the introduction of a set of new armoured blocks: sloped cubes. The magic is this: they are less than half the weight of the corresponding normal cubes and yet their health is about 3% less. So no brainer for fliers: replace all normal and curved cubes with these ones.
This made fliers as heavily armoured as a tank and this was especially boon for tesseract: the drone made up of this sloped cubes, protecting its core functioning parts inside i.e. thrusters and rudders. With the auto-regen feature, fliers can rest somewhere safely (e.g. on top of mountains) and recover.
After a while, I concluded that fliers are superior to other movement-type bots and among fliers, tesseracts are kings. I tried one but alas, I'm not skillful enough to pilot one. Instead, I used a walled-smg copter as a guardian against enemy fliers, especially tesseracts. Here's a video of my gameplay:
Sorry for the lag. Don't know why the recorded video is not performing as normal.
There had been call by the community to the developers to do something about this. Right after Ban pointed out the "magic", I immediately said that they should decrease the cubes hitpoints. Similarly, someone suggested making them heavier. Another suggestion I like was to disallow thrusters to be placed back-to-back i.e. create a zone of denial like the wings.
Instead, Freejam (the developer) just released a new weapon: a flak cannon. Against fliers, it has DPS equal to 6 top smg and half of that against ground. When its shot is near an enemy flier (within an area the size of a megabot bay!!), it will detonate and damage that flier.
So did it work against tesseract? Well, better than plasma. It sure gives anti-air players more avenue to shoot it down but it still requires a little aiming. However, it affects other fliers so much more. People can argue its effectiveness but the bottomline is this: if you want to play flier, your best bet is still a tesseract. If you're not skillful enough to pilot one, then there's nothing for you. The sky will be either empty or plied by skilled tesseracts only judging from how the way things are going. Goodbye copters. Goodbye winged fliers.
In the meantime, I'll stick to playing either smg mech or hover-copter medic.
This made fliers as heavily armoured as a tank and this was especially boon for tesseract: the drone made up of this sloped cubes, protecting its core functioning parts inside i.e. thrusters and rudders. With the auto-regen feature, fliers can rest somewhere safely (e.g. on top of mountains) and recover.
After a while, I concluded that fliers are superior to other movement-type bots and among fliers, tesseracts are kings. I tried one but alas, I'm not skillful enough to pilot one. Instead, I used a walled-smg copter as a guardian against enemy fliers, especially tesseracts. Here's a video of my gameplay:
Sorry for the lag. Don't know why the recorded video is not performing as normal.
There had been call by the community to the developers to do something about this. Right after Ban pointed out the "magic", I immediately said that they should decrease the cubes hitpoints. Similarly, someone suggested making them heavier. Another suggestion I like was to disallow thrusters to be placed back-to-back i.e. create a zone of denial like the wings.
Instead, Freejam (the developer) just released a new weapon: a flak cannon. Against fliers, it has DPS equal to 6 top smg and half of that against ground. When its shot is near an enemy flier (within an area the size of a megabot bay!!), it will detonate and damage that flier.
So did it work against tesseract? Well, better than plasma. It sure gives anti-air players more avenue to shoot it down but it still requires a little aiming. However, it affects other fliers so much more. People can argue its effectiveness but the bottomline is this: if you want to play flier, your best bet is still a tesseract. If you're not skillful enough to pilot one, then there's nothing for you. The sky will be either empty or plied by skilled tesseracts only judging from how the way things are going. Goodbye copters. Goodbye winged fliers.
In the meantime, I'll stick to playing either smg mech or hover-copter medic.
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