Starcore
http://starcore.gametechmods.com
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| Rank | Administrator | |
| Political Stance | Wisdom Tooth, Legend of RA2, Informationalist, Innovationalist, rarely n00b whacker | |
| Grudge / Ally Status | ||
| Allies With | Unknown, most possibly the older, more experienced builders. | |
| Grudges With | Unknown. No one should dare to go against the mighty Starcore anyways. | |
| Fear Rating |  95/100
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| Respect Rating | 95/100
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One of RA2's earliest and current AI master, Starcore created the widely used Starcore AI packs, which replace the weak Stock AI with some truly dangerous machines. As a pure builder, he's no slouch; from the devastating rammer Warmachine to the mighty HS Tempus Fugit, Starcore can take any design and make the best use of it.
Starcore joined the AceUplink RA2 Forums in December 2003 and was banned from their forums before even posting his first post. It was a mix-up, they thought his IP was owned by a toxic member the forums admins had recently banned. But it almost cost the RA2 Community one of its great builders and the founding father of the Starcore Stock Packs and DSL. It is hard to know if RA2 would still be being played if not for his efforts. Luckily the banning got sorted out and Starcore went on to post his first bot on the forums, Borg Queen of which RFS called it, "Overloaded" and ACAMS defended Starcore by saying, "How can it be overloaded, that is like having too much money!"
Starcore v1.0
Starcore went on to release the first Starcore Stock AI pack on January 17, 2004, with 15 teams (of 3-bots each) of his own design (with a bit of help from his sons) all Stock and showing off a wide range of building technique and examples. He believed online competitions and tournaments of the time were ruled by a few bot builders that kept various bot building techniques and Botlab glitches to themselves inducing unfair advantages. Up to and including using hidden parts and AI parts because once a bot was built others couldn't tell from the outside in a Stock competition. Starcore wanted everyone to have a chance to learn and compete on a level playing field. There was also an issue back then of AI packs using unbalanced custom parts to try and give the AI bots unfair advantages over the players that didn't have the same parts available in their bot building. Starcore felt that there was plenty of power to be shown in tight, diverse, efficient Stock AIed bots.
Starcore v2.0
The Starcore v2.0 pack was released on March 11th, 2004, less than two months after Starcore v1.0. For the second Starcore pack, a PM from Rejected (called such because he too had been hit by the banhammers of AceUplink) on ways to improve Alien Queen's stability started a friendship and opened the doors allowing others to include their own bots and teams to show off building skills and an even more diverse range of bot types and techniques. This brought in teams by Rejected, ACAMS, Clutch, Diablo, and Eyce. And many individual bots by Pheud, ACAMS, toAst, Artitan, Clutch, and Rejected. This saw the birth of such bots as the poker VS, Clockwork Hydra, and probably the first juggler in RA2, Mechanical Waterbug. This pack also saw the advent of the Antweight and Beetleweight Classes and bots and bots of those sizes contributed by many and the inclusion of 6-bot teams thanks to code from Disturbed. This helped grow the pack to near 3 times its size at 20 teams of 6 bots each.
DSL-TC
At this point, Starcore was ready to call it good and move on to other things. He had gotten to talking with DarkRat who had made a lot of custom parts and gorgeous picture bot creations for the replica contest and Lu-Tze, a leading component maker who was dealing with health issues behind scenes. Both DarkRat and Lu-Tze were feeling the same way and so the trio decided to do a final swan song to help the RA2 Community. At that point, there was no balancing efforts or standards for developing custom or real life replica components and prior replica packs by others were fraught with unbreakable bots and components. Starcore, DarkRat, and Lu-Tze joined together to balance, populate and AI DarkRat's replica bots, set up standards for custom components, update the interface and arenas and thus DSL-TC (the DarkRat-Starcore-Lu-Tze Total Conversion) was born.
Starcore v4.0
Starcore planned to release the V4 of it's AI pack in 2005, but he disappeared from the community some time ago. He returned in 2007, and an Alpha version of V4 was released tightening designs, upgrading many of the bots to DSA and Caster Armor. This again put the Starcore pack at the forefront of the RA2 Stock packs as one of the most challenging and diverse packs released. Many cut their teeth and grow their skills reviewing and competing against the Starcore pack bots.
Starcore's activity on the forums has slowed to a crawl, but he still enters worthy tournaments once in a while and has seemingly lost nothing of his skill. He also tends to appear and post when his name is mentioned, an event dubbed "the Starcore effect" by R0B0SH4RK.
Building skills
Stock: Still a great Stock builder, even after leaving the community for a while.
DSL: Program manager, Design Lead and AI for DSL 1.0. Starcore started the DSL-TC mod building most the internals and AI for the Stock DSL 1.0 bots.
Notable Robots
Tempus Fugit: A Lightweight horizontal spinner with 6 razor tips and 2 z-teks as weapons. Starcore came back to RA2 briefly and entered an old version entered in BBEANS3 but didn't fair well. This showed to Starcore the community had grown and improved and spurred him into creating a massively updated version for the for Starcore v4 Alpha making it one of the strongest LW HS around.
Alien Queen: One of the more distinctive RA2 VS ever built. Built because Starcore felt he could out-do a famous bot of the time called Digital Apocalypse (DA). Alien Queen has been updated, improved, and made more stable with each edition of the Starcore AI packs.
Fury: Bigger brother to the updated Tempus Fugit. Fury is one of the legendary MW HS.
Maelstrom: A pretty good HW HS. It had wedges in the v3 of the Starcore AI packs, but it now has more plows and belly caster armor.
Spin Doctor: HW HS/SnS hybrid with 30 irons. It may not be as good as Pure HS in sheer damage potential, but with its belly caster armor, it is much better against popups.
T-800 Terminator: A solid HW HS with 27 Maces, 2 Spikes, and 4 Ram Plates. It did very well in BBEANS5.