Robocraft - Armouring Techniques

Traditional Triforcing

Triforcing is essentially redirecting damage around the block that you want to protect. For instance, say you wanted to protect a block with a weapon on, you would place prisms facing away from the block like this (. \|||/. ) The slashes are the prisms, and the straight vertical lines are the block.

This is simple triforcing, you can see that the prisms surrounding the block are not directly touching the block with the plasma on.
You can see from this image, if the damage hits the prism in front of the block with the plasma on, it will not transfer to the block with the plasma on.
When the damage does transfer, however, it will destroy the prism underneath the prism that was hit, as shown in the image above.
It will then hit the block underneath the block with th gun on, and will spread out to the other three consecutive prisms( Prisms that are touching the block).

Rod Triforcing

Rod triforcing is where you place a rod, with a weapon on top, then surround it with blocks, the rod will only touch two blocks, the weapon and the block directly underneath the rod.

This is a cut-away version of rod triforcing, as you can see, the rod touches no other blocks, other than the weapon and the one underneath it.
A completed version of rod triforcing looks like this.
Here are a few different angles of how the damage would spread through the system:
Orange Helium = The first wave of the damage
Blue = The second wave of damage
Grey = The third wave of damage
Orange = The fourth wave of damage
White = The fifth wave of damage

This is a very old form of armouring which makes damage have to go through a series of wall-like structures, having to destroy the whole wall to get to the next one. This technique has become less effective and less used since the removal of the pilot seat in late 2015, but it is still an effective and useful armouring technique, which is why I am including it here.

Here are a couple of different angles of a simple version of space armour.
This armour is good because it prevents damage from being transferred to the blocks behind it, meaning plasma in particular is less effective. This form of armour is good for a bulky bot trying to cut down on CPU to give more energy to weapons.

This is essentially an electroshield which has been placed to redirect damage around a block, so when it is destroyed, it will move the damage to a completely different part of your robot. Again, this technique has been severely reduced in effectiveness since the removal of electroplates in early 2016, as we now have only one type of electroplate, not two as we used to before the update. This affects it because the use for electroplates (The weaker version) was this, so now that we only have electroshields (The stronger version) this armouring technique has essentially become exactly the same as electroplating. I won't be including how to do it here, because I don't think that it really works anymore, but if you want me to include how to do it, just tell me in the comments below and I will add it in!

All that I am going to do here is to leave a link to one of my other guides which covers it in more detail than I can include here.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=629552388

Blockspam is literally spamming loads of blocks, with no attempts to re-route the damage to other parts of your bot, and just hoping that the sheer number of blocks, and the amount of health that gives you, can keep you alive. Blockspam is extremelyeffective in low CPU classes because you won't be getting as many skilled players trying to shoot off specific parts of your robot, e.g. guns and movement types. In higher CPU classes, blockspam is fairly effective, but I personally find that a mixture of blockspam and triforcing works best.

With Blockspam, the best movement types to go with would be Tank Tracks or Mech Legs.

Electroshielding is essentially what it says on the tin, shielding you robot with electroshields. It is best to layer them, so when one electroshield gets knocked off, there is another one behind it, to absorb even more damage. A good idea of this is one of Gamegunner5's robots, which is a medic with a lot of shields stacked up!

I find this fairly effective all round, but it can't really go any lower than 900 CPU, because of the sheer amount of CPU the Electroshields take up. The overall style of bot you want to go with here is probably a fairly fast hover, maybe a cruiser, but nothing slow-moving, like Tank Tracks or Mech Legs. With them, you're just better using blockspam.