Armagetron Game Play Guide

In the game you drive a cycle around the grid. As your cycle moves, you generate a tail/wall, your goal is to make people crash into your wall or trap them until they crash. This sounds easy, but it does take practice.

Playing Armagetron

The way you play Armagetron is affected by the server settings, some servers have infinite walls, which means the tails do not disappear, so if you are trapped, you die. A server that has non infinite tails means that with practice, you can keep moving or go back on yourself until your free Again dependent on server settings, tails can disappear as soon as a person dies or they can have a time delay. Brakes and wall acceleration again are down to server settings.

Acceleration

To accelerate, you have to "grind" another players walls, the closer you can get the faster you will be. You can accelerate more so by creating a tunnel (slingshot) with your own wall and grinding down the center of both walls, again this takes lots of practice

Brakes

The default key for brake is "V", but you can bind whatever key you want for your own preference. Brakes vary from server to server. Brakes can be limited and only have a short life. Some speed servers have reversed the brake option, so *brake = speed*. Brakes are totally dependent on the server settings.

Rubber

Rubber is the amount of tolerance available for grinding walls. The more rubber you have, the longer and closer you can get to walls without crashing. The *HUD* shows you how much rubber you have left and are using, so you know when it is low that you are more likely to crash.
Rubber again differs from server to server, some servers have low rubber which means it is harder to grind walls. To see what a server has the rubber set to, open console and type cycle_rubber and press enter and the servers rubber settings will be displayed.

Ping / Lag

When you enter a game, you see that other cycles have a white triangle in front of them, this is the lagometer. Basically the arrow is an indication of where the person is as to where they actually appear to be, the bigger the arrow the higher that persons ping, everyone has the arrow but you can't see your own.

Lag is not fun for anyone, if you have a high ping on a server you more than likely will be asked to leave, as you can cause other people to lag and cause the server to slow down. You need to close all downloads before entering a server. If you are far away from the server hosting the game, your ping will also be higher, meaning you are likely to lag.

Lag can happen even when your ping is low and normal. Lag can cause you to bounce, go through walls, do unintentional turns and basically cause some really strange things to happen, lol. Most players blaming death on lag are genuine, but, some players blame lag even when there is none. Just because someone says lag and you have none, doesn't mean there isn't any. Lag has to be one of the most annoying things on a server.

Camping

Camping is where you either box yourself in or are boxed in, and instead of trying to find a way out of the maze of walls, the player just rides round waiting for everyone to die.

Camping is frowned upon and if an Admin is present you will more than likely be kicked from a server for camping. If you are trapped, try to find a way out, if not, die, you will get respect for an honourable death.
Its not always easy to define someone as a camper, as some players will try their hardest to escape a maze, and that is not camping. The whole point of the game is to fight, camping spoils the game for everyone. It can also be said that just trapping players and not fighting is a form of camping, if you do trap someone, try go in after them and don't complain about the other person camping if you have trapped them intentionally.

Movie Packs

Movie packs enhances game play by improving sounds and graphics. The extra graphics and sounds give Armagetron the real 'Tron' look. There are various movie packs available for download

Player Ratings (Ladders)

Servers have their own player statistics for most points gained, rounds won and so on while on a server, pressing TAB will show you your score and points gained for the current matches, and will also show you your and other players ping. Most servers have websites where you can view your ladder position, usually the url to the servers stats is posted as the game is loading.