About robot game guides
What these guides are for
Most game guides on the web are either a walkthrough or a list of things you already knew. These are neither. They are explanations of mechanics, written by someone who built the games being described, aimed at the question 'why did that happen' rather than 'what do I press'.
That focus is deliberate, because mechanics transfer and walkthroughs do not. Understanding why attacking during a wind-up loses will make you better at every battle game on this site and at battle games elsewhere. Memorising the obstacle order in one runner helps you with exactly one runner.
How they are organised
The cornerstone guides are the long ones. They cover a whole subject - what robot arcade games are, how robot battle games work, how to improve at them - and each one links out to the shorter guides that go deeper on a single point.
The supporting guides are narrower and more practical. How to dodge, how to read a telegraph, how scoring multipliers actually compound, what a recovery window is. Most take about five minutes to read and are written to be useful on their own rather than only as part of a sequence.
Every guide names the games it applies to and links to them, because advice you cannot immediately try is advice you will not remember.
On accuracy
The numbers quoted in these guides - window lengths, damage values, how long a recovery lasts - come from the games' own source, because the same person wrote both. Where a guide says a deflect window is a fifth of a second, that is the actual figure the code uses.
Where something is a matter of judgement rather than a measurement, the guides say so. 'This is the fastest way to improve' is an opinion formed from playing the games a great deal; 'the recovery on a heavy attack is 0.34 seconds' is not. Keeping those apart is the point of the site's fact-checking policy.
Tips for this category
- Start with the cornerstone guide for whichever category you are playing - each one links to the shorter guides underneath it.
- Read a guide with the game open in another tab. Advice you can try immediately is advice you will keep.
- The timing guides are the highest-value ones on the site, because timing is what every category has in common.
- If a guide quotes a number, it came from the game's source rather than from an estimate.
- Guides are updated when the game they describe changes, and the updated date on each one is real.
- If something in a guide does not match what the game does, that is a bug in the guide - the contact page exists for exactly this.