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Armchair Robotics - Weekly Topical Strategy Discussions

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DDarkray:
What is Armchair Robotics?
Armchair Robotics is a weekly discussion around a selected topic. Ask questions, answer them, and post your thoughts, so that we can all learn from each other and improve our understanding of the game!

Discussions take place in the following locations:

* Official Forum (this thread)
* r/Cogmind
* Steam
* DiscordFor those of you who are looking to get even more involved, you're welcome to come write something about this week’s subject in the google doc below. The community is looking to gradually build up a compendium of helpful tips for newer players to read. Your work might even be added to the ever-expanding Cogmind Community Guide!

* Armchair Robotics Doc
* Cogmind Community Guide (Heavy spoiler warning! Also please note this guide is a work in progress!)
Table of Contents

Here on the forums, all the Armchair topics are combined into a single thread. Add responses/comments to this thread as you like, or use one of the other discussion locations. (r/Cogmind Armchair threads tend to be the most active, but feel free to post anywhere, they all get visitors!)

Quick links to each new topic posted in this thread by the discussion hosts:

* Propulsion Type (first one below!) (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Optimizing Movement (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* RNG and Risk Management (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Storage (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Weapons (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Alert (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Infowar (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Planning Your Run (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* Z (branch) (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* DM (branch) (r/Cogmind, Steam)
* E (branch) (r/Cogmind, Steam)
And the first topic is...

Armchair Robotics Week #1: Propulsion Type
This week we’ll be talking about Propulsion type. Here are a few starting points for discussion:

* What are the pros and cons of different propulsion types?
* How does your choice of propulsion affect your playstyle?
* How many propulsion slots should you evolve?
* What is your favorite type of propulsion and why?Enjoy!

(See the same topic also on r/Cogmind and Steam.)

Mhorre:
My 2 cents:


* What are the pros and cons of different propulsion types?
Treads are the slowest non-overweight propulsion, with normal treads clocking in at 160 and the fastest prototype treads clocking in at 135. They make up for this by providing a huge amount of support, have integrity and coverage enough that they work as armour on their own, and have bonuses to reducing recoil. For combat, treads require the lowest amount of slots to run without going overweight, although the benefit from this is not as good as it sounds due to their 100% trap trigger chance. They're fairly easy to acquire, sentries being a great source of treads. I'm not a fan of treads because of their slow speed, which is punished more and more later into the game, and the fact that although coverage and integrity is the best way to mitigate damage in early and midgame, resistances and evasion are the best ways to do this in lategame. Treads also allow you to literally crush your enemies by rolling over them, which is insanely cathartic if you've lost as many runs to Wastes as I have. :P

Legs are of moderate speed when not overweight, with most legs in the vicinity of 120, plus or minus 10, although there are outliers. They have decent support, usually forcing you to run 4 or 5 propulsion slots to avoid being overweight. Their main benefit is their ubiquity, meaning that you can very easily get basic legs from both grunts and hunters. I don't have a huge amount to say about legs beyond that - I find 5 prop slots wasteful when you could get similar speeds and efficacy at less energy cost running 2 or 3 with wheels. Tripod is a unique playstyle attached to legs, though, and I enjoy that quite a lot. Running 3 legs overweight means your speed tends to hover at about 150, 10 faster than treads, but you only have to use 3 propulsion slots, and you still get the other benefits of abundant sources and decent integrity/coverage, plus it synergizes pretty well with certain items scattered throughout the midgame and the lategame. Kicking is a unique benefit to legs, as well, which makes ramming much less likely (or if running 5, impossible) to cause self-damage. I haven't found a good use for it, but I suppose it is nice in a panic situation.

Wheels are the fastest ground-based propulsion when not overweight, at 80-100, but very low support means you'll probably never see that speed outside of the scrapyard. They suffer from very low integrity as well, meaning that stacking wheels to achieve that speed is a bad idea. The trick up their sleeve, though, is that they have extremely low overweight penalty. You can run several times overweight on wheels and match speeds with legs. Basic wheels are also very available as well, since most non-combat bots use wheels, and there aren't very many types of wheels, so you can run on these basic crappy wheels until lategame, though they do mean a noticeable difference in speed. I personally massively enjoy running 2-prop wheel builds, since they allow basic leg speeds going into endgame, support a very heavy tank build, and allow many utility slots to be evolved which is an incredible power boost. The downsides of this are that wheels need to be heavily armoured to be effective, and the early/midgame is never quite comfortable, since the best damage mitigation comes in later.

Hover, I don't really know a lot about. It's kind of a hybrid between traditional combat and flight styles. It's very fast and has decent evasion and support, but non-combat hover units have low integrity, and there's a huge power difference between basic hover units and combat/prototype hover units, kind of the opposite of wheels. This means that hover is really hard to get your hands on, and it doesn't allow for a lot of mistakes when it comes to losing propulsion. I can imagine that a build combining cooled and combat hover would be very powerful, but it requires a lot of setup, and I'm imagining usually a transition build in between would work? I don't know. If I'm specializing in combat, I'd rather go with wheels than hover, and if I'm specializing in stealth, I'd rather go with flight than hover.

Flight is the prime choice for stealth builds, and that's for a good reason. Incredibly high speed, low support, low integrity, and the ability to hop over other robots all combine to make it the best propulsion out there for avoiding fighting. Flight builds need to be very specialized, and usually have a transition build of treaded or legged combat in early game to set up. Once you get a handle on them, though, they are, in my opinion, the most reliable way to get a basic win. Flight builds suffer from being very fragile in early mid-game (-7, -6), but are more resilient than almost any other build in lategame, and they completely sidestep dealing with alert. However, this all comes at a huge cost - they cannot fight. Yes, I know flying brick exists, but for 99% of the mid and late game you still aren't fighting. But, if your goal does not involve combat at all, you'd do well with flight.


* How does your choice of propulsion affect your playstyle?
As I've stated, I think treads, legs, and wheels are the best choice for combat playstyles. Flight is the best choice for stealthy playstyles. Hover sits somewhere in between - you're fast enough to outrun anything that isn't flying or hovering, which means you can take on more of an evasive combat playstyle? I don't know. All other combat playstyles tend to approach similarity in endgame regarding speed and utility style. Treads do seem a better choice for kinetic builds because of the recoil reduction, but crit builds, the most effective kinetic build, don't tend to have a lot of recoil.


* How many propulsion slots should you evolve?
Depends on the build type you're going for. Treads should work towards 4 propulsion slots (because of 2-slot treads all but eclipsing 1-slot treads by lategame), legs should specialize in tripod or run 4-5 slots, wheels should run 2, flight should run 4-5 if hacker or aim for 8-9 by -1, evolving more slots as needed if flying brick or other heavy style. I don't know about hover.


* What is your favorite type of propulsion and why?
Wheels, definitely. Being able to achieve decent speeds with 2 propulsion slots means you can spend pretty much everything else on utility slots, and seeing as utility slots are the most powerful slot type, this means your resulting lategame build can be very strong. Downsides are that you have a loose mid-game, when good armour hasn't really entered the picture yet, and that if you have sloppy enough play to the point of build collapse, rebuilding is very difficult, as you don't have the ability to run prop armour (or easily transition to another build in lategame), and using your utility slots properly means you have a great number of specialized utilities that may be hard to replace.

Amphouse:
Hello fellow Cogmind players! I'm Amphouse, I've been playing and following this game for a long time and a lot of people know me as the "wheels guy", so normally I would be memeing about wheels here, but since this is meant to be an informative series, I'll talk seriously here and just give my honest opinion about the propulsion types.
 
First off, while wheels do have a lot of potential to be good for a combat build, I do think that using just wheels makes the game harder, so I wouldn't actually recommend it for learning. The main reason to use wheels is to save on slots by only needing either your 2 original prop slots, or possibly evolving one more prop slot for three wheels. You should never use more than 3 wheels(and many people say just use 2), and you should pretty much always be overweight, since wheels have a very small overweight penalty, so they are the ideal propulsion for this. However, since wheels are so fragile, you'll need to constantly kill neutral bots for extra wheels, which is kind of annoying. It's pretty hard to find good wheels on the ground, since wheels are fairly rare and there are not that many types. So..yeah, while wheels are not just a meme and have legitimate uses, I don't actually think they are the best propulsion type.

So what is the best propulsion type? Well...they are all pretty balanced at this point in time I think, and as a result it depends what kind of build you are running. Generally though, I think that flight units are my most commonly used propulsion type, and they are certainly the best prop type for any kind of stealth build. As for combat...I've actually gone back and forth on this, but recently another player has made me appreciate legs a lot more with his reliable "tripod" build. I used to think that treads were superior for combat, but now I'm not so sure. If you're running a full kinetic build, then treads are probably still better for the free recoil reduction, but if you are running an energy weapons build(which I think is generally better, btw), then I actually prefer legs. Legs are similar to wheels in that they don't suffer much from being overweight, and they are also similar in that it is pretty easy to get more from the complex bots, but they actually have good integrity and multiple types including actual good midgame options, unlike wheels. You can't really run out of legs ever, since you constantly get more from grunts and hunters. That makes them very reliable. Even though treads have more integrity, if you break them you actually can run out, since only sentries and haulers(as far as common enemies) have them.  Treads also suffer a lot more from being overweight, compared to legs. That said, late game treads are actually pretty fast, faster than overweight legs, and they have a lot of support, so I think that a underweight treads build is probably a bit better than an overweight legs build in the late game. However, such a treads build would prefer to run 4 tread slots so they can use 2 2-slot treads, while a tripod build only needs 3 legs for the whole game(obviously). So...again, they are very close in power level for combat builds.

Wow, that was long...ok so I've talked about wheels, legs, and treads enough for now. I only briefly talked about flight because I think other players have already said what I would say, so I'll just add on one other important thing - in the late game, flight arrays(2-slot flight propulsion) are extremely good. You can easily run a build with 3 of these that can support 2 large storage units and still have enough support for a late game combat build. This is probably the strongest build in the game. Some people like to call this the "flying brick" build. I think that's a dumb name because all of my late game flight builds end up looking like that, so I just call it late game flight. Your alternative would be to run multiple(4-6) prototype single slot flight units and go super fast, which sounds good but...it's not really worth it, when the brick build is fast enough to avoid most enemies anyways and gets to hold and use way more items. It is better for speedrunning, though.

Finally, I should talk about hover. This is my least used propulsion type, but that's not because it's bad-it's actually quite good, but it's hard to use. Since flight is better for strictly stealth, hover is best suited for a hybrid build that plays stealthy most of the time but is still prepared and capable of combat when it benefits you the most. I love this play style but it's very hard to pull off. It doesn't help that most early game hover kinda sucks - the stuff you get off of watchers just isn't good enough. Programmer hover is average. The best hover units from enemies come off of demolishers, but killing them isn't easy, and generally it's better if you never have to fight them in the first place. There are 2 other ways for a hover build to get good propulsion: Zion light allies drop Z-glide systems, which are very good, but extremely fragile; and you can fabricate hover units, which isn't that unreasonable since a hover build will be playing stealthily and using hackware anyways. Notably, since combat hovers are not prototypes, they are a very good target for schematic hacking and subsequent fabrication, as you will get 2 from each fab. Final note: if you want to play pure melee combat(very fun build), hover is probably your best choice of propulsion. I've made one attempt at this before but I'd like to try it more in the future.

Well, that's about all I have to say as far as general tips go, but if anyone has any questions for me about what type of propulsion suits what type of build, go right ahead and ask me.   

Kyzrati:

--- Quote from: Amphouse on August 03, 2018, 05:47:43 PM ---First off, while wheels do have a lot of potential to be good for a combat build, I do think that using just wheels makes the game harder, so I wouldn't actually recommend it for learning.

--- End quote ---
That's how I see them, too. In fact, as GJ essentially proved, and I played a bit this way, too, is that you can really own with hybrid propulsion schemes, and wheels can be a part of the best setups. Like using treads for their tankiness, longevity, and recoil reduction in combat but switching over to wheels for faster movement since only a small number will be fine even when inevitably overweight. Halftracking it :P (I think at one point GJ also kept flight units around to jump enemies, although that was probably back before being overweight prevented jumping, since temporarily switching a heavy build over to flight is not good for your overweight status!)

In any case, hybrid propulsion is an interesting subtopic here.

In terms of my own strategies, regardless of propulsion type I tend to evolve more slots than most players who excel at using that type. This is more of a defensive approach (despite my style being combat-focused), since extra propulsion is basically "free armor," and you don't have to worry about being overweight since you can always throw on more propulsion, or even go hybrid.

Definitely not a very efficient, approach, but it's a safer way to tackle the main complex, which is what I normally stream. Better optimization is required for tougher extended game areas!

My favorite propulsion used to be legs, for sure, and then treads became a lot more viable as they got faster by default, so I'm now split between the two for my combat builds, often switching back and forth depending on what I find. Wheels are really fun, too, and I'll use those if I happen across armored variants. I tend to have armor anyway, so the wheels won't get shot off that easily and the extra speed is nice to have.

zxc:
X-post from reddit:

I wrote up some initial thoughts regarding propulsion a while ago, and I'll quote it here below:


--- Quote ---Propulsion type and build strategy are tightly coupled

Propulsion type primarily affects speed, support, and integrity

A mismatch between propulsion type and build strategy leads to underperformance

Choice of propulsion type can transform over a run

Flight

Fastest speed, lowest support, lowest integrity, hopping over robots ability

Key stats define it as extreme propulsion characterised by avoidance of confrontation

Low integrity exposes it to massive attrition if damage is not avoided or mitigated well enough

High speed amplifies energy costs and heat generation

Arrays trade some speed for support and reduction in energy/heat effects

High speed and the flight bonus leads to high evasion, which can be effective damage avoidance if maximised

Low support benefits more from low mass items such as processors, hackware, melee weapons, light power sources, sensor/scanner utilities, and power amplifiers

Low support means minimal inventory space

Hover

Fast speed, moderate support, moderate integrity

Key stats define it as flexible propulsion suiting a hybrid approach of not avoiding all confrontation

Excellent balance between speed and support suits endgame play

Significantly worse than flight for confrontation avoidance, which it must make up for with robustness and some combat ability

Relatively rare and therefore vulnerable to attrition

Fast speed must be taken advantage of

Wheels

Moderate speed, moderate-high support, moderate integrity, low penalty

Key stats define it as suitable for maintaining moderate speeds while significantly overweight

Low penalty is best taken advantage of with a minimum of propulsion slots (excluding propulsion armour)

Low end wheels common on main floors but high end wheels are significantly rarer

Exposed to traps while overweight

Legs

Slow speed, high support, high integrity, kicking ability (+20% chance per active slot)

Key stats define it as flexible propulsion for combat focused play

Most common type found from hostile robots and high integrity makes it resistant to attrition

Treads

Slowest speed, highest support, highest integrity, no self-damage when ramming ability, crushing ability (chance varies), reduced recoil (-1% recoil per active slot)

Key stats define it as extreme propulsion for combat focused play

Vulnerable to traps

High likelihood of triggering traps and slow speed reduces the importance of staying under the support limit

Exposed to extermination clock due to slow speed

Reduced ability to avoid combat and therefore alert gain and item attrition

Recoil reduction benefits kinetic builds the most

Propulsion doubles as effective armour

High end treads somewhat rare but last a long time

Often occupy two slots per item (especially at endgame), preferring an even number of propulsion slots
--- End quote ---

To continue...

My favourite propulsion is flight. This should come as no surprise to anyone. It's sleek and elegant. My favourite items in the game are lightweight and go perfectly well with flight. Hacking is extremely powerful and pairs perfectly with flight. Having a significantly faster movespeed than everyone else opens up a lot of options. The big downside is how fragile you are.

You can play flight in a variety of ways. Any number of propulsion slots is perfectly viable. With just two, you can run an ultra light hacking build. It's over the top but it works. With a dozen prop slots, you'll be using a whole lot of propulsion armour (inactive treads and legs which serve as massless armour) and you'll have heaps of spare flight units already equipped and ready to be switched on whenever you need them.

The sweet spot is definitely 4-8 prop slots though. Even numbers are better because of flight arrays, which are extremely strong and pragmatic. Impulse thruster arrays support 27 mass for two slots spent, which is 13.5 support per slot, but also have the cost of a typical one slot flight unit. They can also be fabricated in pairs. They're certainly not the best flight units but they are so useful in transitioning to a high-end flight build or just completing a w0. The best flight units for mass support are 16 support per slot (imp. q-thruster I think?).

A lot of the time I play with 6 prop slots because it's 'just right'. You reach something like 20 speed with endgame flight units that way with about 80 support, which is enough for 2-3 lrg storage.

One big vulnerability of flight is stasis traps. If you're running 'tight', with no excess mass support, you're going to get stuck in one for ages. Some methods to counteract this:

* Ensure that you never get hit by stasis traps. This means having operator allies, hacking machines and robots, and exploring through rooms as much as possible instead of using hallways.
* Have excess propulsion slots with flight units ready to be switched on to 'burst' through the stasis.
* Have treads as propulsion armour and switch them on for the one or two turns it takes to break free.
* Have stasis canceller utilities at the ready. I don't like this because it's so niche and consumes a slot, even if it's an inventory slot.

Flight is very tough early in the game. I still do switch to flight very often in Materials, but it's not exactly optimal to do so. For years, the preferred strategy has been to play combat early on and accrue a number of items to be used in a switch to flight around the end of Materials or the start of Factory. This is still the way to go. Materials is very confined and difficult to avoid enemies in, and early flight units are so fragile that they'll be blown off with a single bad hit.

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