Team Basics

Origins

Team battles in classic Robocode were developed and documented by the RoboWiki community around the TeamRobot class. Robocode Tank Royale ships the same idea as a core platform feature with its own message API.

Drop five copies of a strong duelist into a team battle and the first new bug shows up immediately: the same targeting logic that never had to think twice in 1v1 now puts a bullet into a teammate. Team battles do not just add more bots to the arena. They add a second problem that 1v1 and melee never asked: which of the bots on screen are actually the enemy.

Know who not to shoot

Both platforms give a bot a direct way to check that before firing. Classic Robocode's TeamRobot class adds isTeammate(name), and Tank Royale's Bot interface adds isTeammate(id). Any targeting loop that scans nearby bots needs this check before anything else, since a targeting system built for 1v1 has no built-in reason to skip a bot standing right next to the one it wants to hit.

for scannedBot in allSeenBots:
    if isTeammate(scannedBot):
        continue
    considerAsTarget(scannedBot)

A targeting loop skips a nearby teammate and locks onto the enemy instead.

The leader sees, the droids swing

Classic Robocode lets a team mix a special kind of bot into the roster: a Droid, which trades its radar for 20 extra energy. A Droid cannot see the battlefield on its own, so it depends entirely on messages from a teammate that can. Tank Royale carries the same trade-off forward with its own Droid interface: more energy, no radar, total dependence on teammates for target data.

Classic Robocode adds one more incentive to organize the team around a single set of eyes: the first bot in the team list becomes the leader and gets 100 bonus energy, 200 total, or 220 if that leader is also a Droid. A team that puts real radar work into one leader and lets that leader's messages steer a pack of Droids is following an incentive the game itself built in.

Both platforms move that information with a small messaging API. Classic Robocode's broadcastMessage(message) reaches every teammate at once, using getTeammates() to see who is on the roster. Tank Royale's equivalent is broadcastTeamMessage(message), and it also offers sendTeamMessage(teammateId, message) for reaching one teammate directly.

Name the cost

RoboWiki is candid about what full coordination actually costs: assigning good spots to each bot, keeping teammates out of each other's line of fire, avoiding collisions, and coordinating who fires at what all take real design work. Its own observation is that many of the strongest-ranked teams skip most of that. Five instances of a solid melee bot with basic team awareness, mostly just isTeammate checks, already beats most opponents without any deeper coordination. Flocking and role assignment are real gains, but they are a second project layered on top of a team that already avoids shooting itself.

Platform notes

	Classic Robocode	Tank Royale
Team-aware base	TeamRobot class	Bot interface (any bot can join a team)
Teammate check	isTeammate(name)	isTeammate(id)
Broadcast to all	broadcastMessage(message)	broadcastTeamMessage(message)
Message one teammate	sendMessage(name, message)	sendTeamMessage(teammateId, message)
Droid trade-off	no radar, +20 energy	no radar, more energy
Leader energy bonus	+100 energy (200 total, 220 for a Droid leader)	not documented

Classic Robocode limits each message to 32,768 bytes after Java serialization. Tank Royale has per-turn limits as well: 64 packets, up to 128 payloads when batches are counted, 49,152 UTF-8 bytes per packet, and 262,144 UTF-8 bytes for the compact packet array. Convert bearings into one consistent angle convention before passing position data between teammates, since classic Robocode headings are compass-style while Tank Royale headings are mathematical.

Further Reading

• Teams - RoboWiki (classic Robocode)
• Team Messages - Tank Royale documentation