Building Your Skillset

This article is for new players that want to get good at the game. It provides a path to follow and discusses the basic set of skills that are needed to play the game. Even older players can benefit from this article, and are invited to contribute their collected wisdom.

Server Selection
Obviously, you're going to select servers on which you have low pings. The main settings to be concerned with are wall size, rubber, base speed, acceleration, and point awards. Some servers have brakes, others don't, so to build the most portable skillset, you need to work without brakes. I suggest unbinding your brake key while learning.

Each server, due to its settings, is going to emphasize a different part of your skillset. High rubber means heavy grinding. Infinite walls give a distinct advantage to mazing, and so forth. So to start, you should make sure you're playing several different servers that you can reach with a reasonable ping. You should also play servers that you have a really nasty ping on, so you can learn how to account for lag into your tactics.

Recommended Servers
Here are some servers that will help you to build specific skills. This is not a recommendation of fun servers or an endorsement of any particular server, however. Some of these servers have very specific audiences and some have very wide audiences. You will pick the ones you find the most fun based on your own tastes, this list is focused on servers that are good for building particular skills.


 * Swampland - Open grid combat, emphasizes speed and manoeuvring. For European players, this server is excellent practice in high ping conditions.
 * Shrunkland - A small grid with long walls emphasizes mazing and close combat
 * Guru3's Server - Brakes, low cycle acceleration, and infinite walls emphasize close combat. For American players, this server is excellent practice in high ping conditions.
 * MicroBusCity - The intersection of Tigers and Swampland, this server is fast and with long walls. Point awards are based on survival rather than killing.  This server emphasizes speed and manoeuvring, and will help to develop the ability to switch between close combat and open grid fighting.
 * Sumo - This server emphasizes close combat and mazing by placing each cycle in a ring with up to 3 other cycles. If you venture out of the ring for too long, you will die.  You must survive in the ring.  It is geared towards practicing to play the goalie position on a team-based fortress server, but the skills practiced are generally applicable to any close combat situation.

It's a common myth that playing locally will enhance your skills for internet games. I recommend not doing that if your ultimate goal is to play over the internet, because lag is a big enough part of the game that playing locally will affect your skillset negatively; you won't learn to account for lag.

The main areas (as I see them) that you need to work on are Grinding, Fast and Slow manoeuvring, Duelling, Zoning, and Camera Control.

Grinding
Grinding is such a basic part of the game that it's inarguably the first area for you to focus on. If you can't grind well, you can't accelerate well, it's as simple as that. Grinding can be defined as "Getting as close to the wall as possible without crashing, and turning so that you are running parallel to the wall". This is for any player's wall as well as the grid wall, with the player's walls giving you acceleration in the deal. In order to grind, you approach a wall and actually hit it. At the moment of contact with the wall, there will be a slight pause before your cycle explodes into pieces. The length of that pause is determined by your speed and the amount of rubber available. When you have run out of rubber, you explode. So the longer you wait before turning, the closer you will be to the wall after you turn. But if you wait too long, big bada boom.

Grinding is also a tactic, as well as a basic manoeuvring skill. As a tactic, it's fairly straightforward. To seal someone in a box, you have to grind the open points on the box, closing the box. To drive someone into a corner (any corner, not necessarily the grid corners) you have to grind both sides of the corner, leaving one side with enough space for the player to reasonably get in it and sealing the other side so they can't turn without hitting your wall. Grinding as a tactic can be effective, but is also easily defeated by better grinding, so while you need to build this skill first, it's a skill you should work on intermittently on its own. Instead, focus on working grinding into the rest of your tactics, where it will serve you best.

More information can be found on the Grinding page.

Speed
Speed confers a strong advantage to a person who can manoeuvre at high speeds, but a tactical advantage can also be gained by being good at low speed manoeuvring, especially against someone who depends on speed and is therefore likely to have a weakness in low speed manoeuvring. As you pick up speed, it becomes harder to grind any wall you approach, because the magical period during which you have struck the wall but haven't crashed is reduced in time, requiring faster moves to make the grind.

Speed isn't used as a standalone tactic, generally. It is part of every move you ever make, however. A speed kill is generally associated with a pretty simple kill that you earned through the advantages conveyed by high speeds, but the kill itself is usually very basic in nature. If your speed is high enough compared to the bike you've targeted, it is possible to build all four sides of the box around that bike before they escape and/or attack you directly.

To build skills at different speeds, you want to work in both an open grid and a pretty confined grid. The open grid will give you plenty of opportunities to work on grinding at high speeds, and the confined grid will give you plenty of opportunities to work on manoeuvring at high speeds in close quarters. The open grid will also give you an area in which to work on building a high speed and maintaining it. Reaching a high speed is generally pretty easy, but staying at a high speed is harder because as you get faster you have to grind more to stay fast.

Building Speed With a Launcher
One of the best ways to build up speed is by constructing a trail pattern that I call “The Launcher”. I’m not exactly sure if this manoeuvre has a name or not, but I’m going to call it the launcher until I hear otherwise :D...

The basic manoeuvre goes like this. First, you head straight in one direction for a little bit- the longer you make it, the faster you will come out. Once you have gone far enough, do a 180 and follow your trail back almost to the end. Next, do a 180 into your last wall like you are going to box yourself. Then do a 180 towards the wall you are grinding now which will take you out of your box and shoot you out a lot faster then you went in. Note that this will shoot you in the opposite direction of your ﬁrst turn, so you could either turn the direction opposite your desired ﬁnal orientation, or you could throw in another 180 outward before you do the inward 180. It sounds kind of confusing when I write it out, but it is really easy once you get the hang of it. (By the way, don’t even try this if rubber is less than 6).

You can make many variations on this as well, like grinding the launcher wall multiple times to build up more speed, or you can make a very short launcher to help escape an enemy that is faster than you. Another technique that many speed players favor is to start oﬀ a round by going about halfway to the center of the arena and constructing a launcher to build up speed for the initial clash. You will see launcher-like trails all over the grid and you should learn to incorporate these techniques into your game eﬀectively.

Manoeuvring
Manoeuvring and mazing are shades of the same skills. Mazing can be defined as manoeuvring at close quarters, but that's not entirely accurate. Manoeuvring is as much navigation as it is simple turning. The right moves can be found to kill everyone at any speed in any situation, so this is easily the most important skill you need to build. It's also the most basic skill of the game, so you will always be working on it.

Manoeuvring as a tactic comes in three flavors: mazing, attack, and defense. Mazing is both an attack and a defense, and there's a fine line between a good mazer and a damn camper. Building a maze is tricky because it requires you to create paths that will confuse anybody who enters it, but still allow you to get out. Some players are easily suckered into mazes, others will go in to get you, and still others won't go in at all, preferring to fight in the open grid.

Manoeuvring for attack is all about putting your wall in front of someone before they can turn away from it. You don't necessarily have to cross their line to get them to hit your wall. A little subtlety will go a long way in this regard. Tricking players to turn into your wall is generally more reliable (and harder) than just crossing their path.

Manoeuvring for defense is all about putting walls in places to prevent someone from attacking you or allowing yourself a way out.

Zones
Zoning is what you might expect it to be if you've ever played a zone defense in any regular sport. The grid itself is made up of several zones. As walls get laid down, several zones will appear. Generally speaking, you can expect the zones to appear in a predictable fashion, even though all players on the grid will behave unpredictably. Being able to play the zones is comprised of knowing how to take advantage of each zone to attack someone, and knowing how to manoeuvre into and out of each zone consistently.

Each cycle also has several zones around it that interact with the zones of the arena, and with each other's zones. Each attack you make will be initiated first from your cycle, then through a specific zone around your cycle, through the grid zone that the two cycles are in, and through/across a zone around the target cycle, and finally ending at the target cycle.

On a simpler note, defending that requires initiating some sort of action is about closing your zones to the other cycle. The easiest way to do it is to turn around and run, but it's not the only way.

Working the zones is key to using zoning in your tactics. Like any other sport, zoning can be de-emphasized. But like the other sports, doing so opens up weaknesses. Zoning is most used in team play, when understanding the interaction of the zones is vital to killing other cycles without killing your teammates.

On the whole, zones get tighter and smaller as more players enter the grid, so your zone-based tactics will need to be different depending on the number of players on the grid.

Zoning is a complex topic. It is also a very low-level topic, since most of what's conceptually a zone in play is handled by a part of your brain that you're not conscious of. Most players either have only a rudimentary understanding of zones or none at all, yet they still consider zoning in their attacks and defenses. If you want to consider the phrase "zone of influence", from military jargon, during your play, then that's probably all you need to do unless you're a hopeless taxonomic freak.

Camera Control
Camera Control is all about being able to look around you so you know what's going on. It can be a hard skill to acquire, but it is an essential skill. Glance controls are the ones most used, because they give you the ability to look around and then return back to a regular view. There are other camera controls, such as zooming, and camera switching. You will need to find a combination of controls that works for you and then practice it. You will need to be able to switch views as instinctively and as easily as you turn your head while walking.

Dueling
Dueling is obviously the skill that is used when it is you against one other cycle. The tactics change for one cycle versus many cycles. Dueling and jousting are similar, the difference between that jousting usually involves both cycles turning away and having to go back to the end of their traces to face each other again. This resembles medieval jousting quite a bit, actually. Dueling involves knowing the other player well enough to know how to attack them. Some players are better attacked by defending yourself instead and letting them screw up. Other players are better attacked in a straightforward fashion. Still others can only be defeated with subtlety and trickery. And still others only give you a few seconds to make an attack, and if it doesn't succeed you're dead. Dueling as a skill can be de-emphasized safely, if you're willing to sacrifice a point at the end of each round when it's just you and one other cycle. On servers that provide point awards just for being the last one standing (also known as the Camper Reward), you will have to duel the last enemy alive.

Keyboard Layout
Choosing your keybindings is pretty tricky. In any discussion of keybindings, I find that most people have completely different keybindings. How your hands work together is important. I would suggest that piano players and expert typists should put left-hand moves and cameras on their left hand, literally, and right-hand moves and cameras on their right hand. As a guitar player, I find putting moving on my right hand and cameras (and score) on my left-hand works very well. It's important to remember that you can bind the same action to multiple keys. This brings us to double-binding versus non-double-binding. I don't want to get into it as a tactic or skill, but choosing your keybindings is integral to choosing your game. It's also a subject you should revisit periodically and see if you can make your keybindings better.

Like I suggested at the beginning, I recommend unbinding your brake for starters. You can bind it later and work it into your skillset, but there are distinct advantages conveyed on the player who can play without brakes that can't be denied. Some servers don't have brakes at all, others make their brakes an accelerator. Even among servers that have brakes the effect of the brake varies widely. Players also vary widely in their opinion of the brake. As a result of all of this, the skillset that is most portable amongst servers is the skillset that doesn't depend on any specific brake effect and can also easily assimilate the server's brake settings. After you've gotten fairly good and find yourself winning a few rounds by skill rather than luck, then you might consider binding the brake key and learning how to use your brakes on the servers that have them.

Internal Resources
Animated Tactics Watch and learn!