Software is awkward at the best of times, when you using a bizarre language based on inter-connecting tiles in a limited area its more challenging. Forget sensible structure and flow control, you'll be constantly re-formatting your code in the hope you'll fit that extra instruction in.

Your software makes the difference between beating the computer in a war of attrition and spanking its feeble forces with a couple of deadly units. So its worth spending some time getting it right. I started by tweaking the existing master cards to improve the software, but ended up writing my own from scratch.

Requirements

In the finest tradition of software engineering we will start off by defining what we want are software to do. Unfortunately 'kill the opposing bots' while accurate is difficult to break into useful terms so we'll use something a little specific.

Ideally you want three of your undamaged robots to take on three undamaged opponents, destroy them, and still have three robots left at the end. Having sub weapon ammo left and no damage is a bonus.

Movement

• Make sure you're opponents are at the correct range for your weapons. Really depends on your weapons, I tended to use 200m for lasers, 150m for short range rockets. Legged robots can use hand to hand at 30m or less, but it tends to be suicidal as the friendly fire gets intense.
• Finding the opposition when they run away.
• Avoid firing at your allies and obstacles in the landscape. Both waste amunition, the former is positively harmful to your bots.
• Avoiding your opponents fire, i.e. dodging (legged robots are better at this) and tangential movement. Your bots lack any mechanism for adding lead when firing at a moving target. Any target moving at a tangent to your robot is difficult to hit.
• Seperating your allies, this helps avoid them shooting each other, stops your opponents hitting all of them with a single rocket etc.

Firing

You want to fire your weapons when you have an enemy in your firing arc at a range appropriate for your weapons. You'll also want to avoid firing when you're out of ammunition. Having some method of limiting the rate you fire your secondary weapon at is also a good idea.

Instructions

A couple of things the manual doesn't mention about instructions, first all the movement chips act until you do something else. So you keep moving forward until you use a different command, so a 'wait' after a movement chip has no effect. But this allows you to do other processing while moving.

Jumping forward or backwards carries a Prowler by 25m, obstructions allowing, whereas sideways jumps move 30m.

Programs

Well they worked for me:-

• Prowler
• Dodger
• Vypor