Welcome back! We’re up to lesson three of our Angry Birds Go Offensive Driving course, and now we focus on true offense in Wheel to Wheel Combat. This lesson was written by @les-toreadors of Pigineering and adapted for the ‘Nest by @amslimfordy.
In your job of ferrying the all important eggs down the mountainside, sooner or later you are going to be beset by a horde of upstart pigs who want to relieve you of your precious cargo! Soon, you are forced to make a ‘flight or fight’ decision on whether to confront those unruly rolls of bacon fat, or try to outrun the opposition. But the pigs are too many, and you decide that, as the impromptu defender of avian honor on this very road, you are going to make a stand…
Angry Birds Go does not penalize you for causing mayhem on the track. No lifetime bans for punting opponents, no revocation of licenses for making those lazy porcine drivers roll after you’ve blown their contraptions into fragments of balsa wood.
Quite the contrary, an early successful punt guarantees the opponent won’t catch up to you in a Champion Chase! Also, while the AI in the game is very effective (and entertaining!) at executing a prolonged wheel to wheel battle, it can’t do much if you are out in front dutifully maintaining your top speed carving out a precise line through the canyon. You do know what a perfect driving line looks and feels like by now do you?
But there are certain circumstances in which you are in a situation where you two have to jockey for position seconds before the next corner. Whomever takes the inside of the turn very likely will be able to generate a momentary speed advantage, and here are several tips for wheel to wheel combat that you may find useful once in a while:
The PIT maneuver, commonly used for taking getaway cars off the road in a police chase, is highly effective in ABGO. Pushing on or outright ramming an opponent kart’s back wheel from the side induces a large torque on the vehicle and will cause it to spin out, giving you an easy overtaking opportunity. You have to do a clean PIT maneuver on the target so as to actually be able to overtake, rather than pushing it with your nose into a stable drift.
You may from time to time also elect to cut a corner by driving inside an opponent’s line then deliberately straightening out to cause a crash in your favor – basically steer straight into the side of a cornering opponent, who spins out while you cruise off to victory.
You can also elect to go defensive, and concentrate on holding a steady line to the next corner. A defensive run is useful if the opponent does not have any means to explosively attack your kart (looking at you, Bomb Bird), yet is attempting to push you out of line. The opponent kart is alongside and attempting to steer into you. Doing so causes the opponent to lose a slight bit of speed, which can be decisive at times. In other cases the AI will elect to lock itself into position with you in this manner, while being unable to exert enough rotational force as in the PIT maneuver above. This allows you to control the opponent kart’s position, and you can easily steer that rude driver into the nearest wall! This is easily visualized in Formula One where a leading driver steers hard into the apex of a corner in front of an opponent attempting to pass on his inside, forcing the opponent to brake or crash.
And yet at other times the best solution to the wheel-lock problem is not really to stagnate yourself in a fruitless pushing contest but to back off and change your line. Often, when you attack an opponent wheel to wheel in Champion Chase, the opponent goes defensive and smartly concentrates on holding his or her line. Why? It’s because he/she is holding the optimal driving line through the course and by passively holding top speed with minimal steering input, he/she is successfully maintaining the upper hand while you lose energy trying to jockey for position. The correct way to break this deadlock is to back off and setup a clean pass. Or use your special powers and try to disrupt/ram/mobility kill your opponent. It’s up to you. Just don’t keep up a fruitless wheel-lock scenario and leave yourself at the mercy of the AI’s next move!
Originally posted on Pigineering here.
by Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)
