Both get you across the arena. One is built to win the first thirty seconds, the other to still be driving after taking a beating. Picking a drivetrain is picking which fight you want.
Right out of the gate, tracks cost you. They accelerate slower, top out lower, and turn worse, because treads are heavy and drag. In BotForge a tracked bot pays about 22% top speed and 28% turn rate for the privilege.
Wheels are punished hard when they get shot off. A wheeled bot's mobility scales with the square of its surviving wheels, so losing half your wheels does not cut your mobility in half, it cuts it to a quarter:
Tracks shrug it off. A tread spreads the load across all its road wheels, so it keeps a floor of 0.6 mobility no matter how many individual wheels are knocked out:
So there is a crossover. At full health wheels win. Once a bot has lost a chunk of its wheels, the tracked bot is suddenly the faster one, because the wheeled bot has crawled to a stop. Find it in the Drive Lab.
Lose wheels evenly and a wheeled bot just slows down. Lose them unevenly, more on one side, and it pulls toward the dead side and cannot drive straight. The harder it pushes, the worse the pull:
Tracks are not invincible. Knock out an entire side's road wheels and the track is thrown: the tread comes off, the floor is gone, and now it is crippled like a wheeled bot (mobility back to the square law) and it veers too. So spread fire barely dents a tracked bot, but focused fire on one side can still break it.
| Real physics | In BotForge / RumbleBots |
|---|---|
| treads are slower and turn worse | tracks speedMul 0.78, turnMul 0.72 (wheels are 1.0 / 1.0) |
| wheels fail fast as they are lost | wheeled mobility = aliveFrac² |
| tracks keep moving when damaged | tracked mobility = max(0.6, aliveFrac) until a track is thrown |
| uneven wheel loss pulls you sideways | veer = 0.15 × imbalance × speed (intact tracks are exempt) |
| blow off a whole side and the tread comes off | thrown track → mobility falls back to aliveFrac² and it veers |
Six quick questions. Pick an answer to see why.