Get in (a Defensive) Shape pt.2

Before tail shrink, that little physics change that let you go through the end of your tail, burning some rubber, defenses weren’t “closed”, there was space between their cycle and the end of their tail. Going inside their tail would make them accelerate much and they would go too fast, and if they tried to make a couple of turns so that they wouldn’t be on their tail anymore, they would let a giant space for attackers to come in.

Radian defense

Rarely called like this, but rarely named at all, it simply consists of going behind your tail. Making some turns inside was made easier, due to the fact you wouldn’t get stuck on the end of your tail all the time. However, the defense rapidly loosed space, and attackers could go in quite easily with speed attacks.

Active defense

I humorously call it like this, as opposed to passive attacks, which consists of doing nothing and waiting for the defender to die alone. It doesn’t have much of a name, although it’s a quite common defense today.

It basically consists of using the radian defense, but actually attacking the attackers by [ab]using tail shrink to get out of your defense, surprise the attacker and kill it. The defense back up space whenever they are on a safe side of the defense, where there are no attackers.

Of course, attacking attackers should be used moderately, otherwise you will end up with a big hole between you and the end of your tail. To rapidly get back behind your tail once attacking attackers, the best is to make some irregularities when building the defense, so that you can go straight have have the tail back at your level.

Oh, and it’s my favorite defense 🙂