Messages

• Which random mechanic is the most annoying? (item spawns, hostile encounters, miss chance, which parts get hit, branch depths, hacking, etc.)

Definitely item spawns. Especially in certain Research branches. Especially in T. Second is branch depths, specifically Storage depth and S7 depth. Storage is just plain irritating to have on -7 and it's punished reckless play for me a few times. Another RNG mechanic that's irritating is sequential enemy encounters, enemy encounters in bad locations and enemy encounters near garrisons, although this only causes significant damage if my build is either not strong enough or I play the situation wrong. Finally, chute traps. I rarely succumb to chute traps anymore because I don't get cocky and cross areas that could possibly have chute traps, but getting jumpscared by them is still annoying regardless.

S7 and T spoilers

It's irritating to have S7 adjunctive to T and not Q because I'm lazy and for some reason I assume that 7 will always be on the same depth as Q. Also, I never get SHELL on combat builds. Ever.

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• How much does your success rely on RNG?

Not a huge amount, assuming I'm playing well. The difference RNG makes on my build, if I'm playing well, is the difference between an excellent build and an acceptable one. If I'm not playing well, however, RNG plays a lot more of a part in things. When I'm playing poorly, a bad fight or bad sequence of fights can kill my run.

• How do you plan around randomness?

Use storage, and make sure that you have enough in storage to replace all of the vital parts of your build. Keep at least 1-2 launchers - 2-3 explosive launchers at all times is a must in Factory. Keep a melee weapon for breaking walls and panic situations. Plan assuming worst-case scenarios rather than best-case scenarios - have plans that work regardless of RNG. Have backup plans in case of worst-case scenarios. Keep your tactics flexible. Use your environment, bottleneck, use AOE weapons on clustered enemies. Use explosive machines and traps against your enemies, if you can (and you're sure you can deal with the resulting increase in alert). Position for worst-case situations. Experience helps, too. Once you know the actual potential range of events, you can better plan for them. Strong builds are less affected by RNG, so anything you can do to improve your build strength will also reduce the amount you're affected by bad RNG.

• How well do your builds handle things going wrong?

Depends on the build and current build strength. With 2 or 3 prop builds, you can be extremely durable given a fairly strong build if you haven't yet hit the point of build collapse or imminent build collapse, but you don't have the slots for prop armour to comfortably escape and rebuild if you do, and the utility-heavy playstyle means that you will probably struggle to replace rare utilities that nonetheless contribute importantly to your build power. I've been experimenting with treads lately and have found that they can rebuild extremely easily comparatively. I haven't gotten a handle on brick or light hacker, though, so my runs using those builds don't respond very well to things going wrong.

• What advice would you give to people who find that there is too much RNG in cogmind?

Play more deliberately and thoughtfully. Honestly. Plan before runs - plan during runs. Plan to reduce variance, don't just go with the flow. If you don't know how to do that yet, play more. When you die, review the run to see if you can point at anything that caused the death. This can be hard to do as a new player, since death tends to come fairly late after whatever caused it, but once you have the amount of games under your belt to start drawing connections between cause and effect when it comes to death, it's a very important way of improving your play. Also, a lot of new players underestimate the importance of storage, I know I did. If anyone who doesn't know already is reading this: 1 medium storage is pretty much necessary for any viable flight build. 2 large storage is my minimum for combat, with a preference for 3.

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.

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.