Building goals
Building goals are somehow like schools of thought in RA2 building, or more precisely what your building aims at. There are a few different styles that builders adhere to, or not.
Efficiency First
Motto: "Efficient building is the cornerstone of good building"
This style is mostly preoccupied by efficiency, although it can have any of the other goals (most often originality or competitive building, but rule of cool can happen as well). It seeks to use the best setups of the best components to build something interesting. It often frowns upon the use of useless components. They are not as much as a goal as the other ones, and do not believe in efficiency for efficiency's sake, but merely in efficiency for building's sake.
Figurehead: Naryar Main Followers:
Rule of Cool
Motto: "Building bots is mostly about aesthetics !"
Figurehead: Joeblo, Followers: Thyrus, Clickbeetle
Originality's Sake
Motto: "Driving building to new limits"
Figurehead: Clickbeetle
An original builder builds new designs, creates new bot types, and is generally highly respected.
Strictly Competitive Building
This style is known to care mostly about combat effectiveness. Most bots built like that are intensively tested and rebuilt, and are generally nightmares to face in the arena.
Figurehead: Starcore, Followers: 123STW (in the past), Urjak
Exploration
This style is somehow random, and mostly followed by newcomers (but not only). The goal here is "what is this going to do ?" rather than "how can I make this bot ?" Most bots of these are random ideas and not really good, but some can be very good new ideas, as well cornerstones for a new bot type. Madman3 is an example of a member whose random idea became a strong new bot type.
Followers: Nearly every builder at the start of their careers. People than want to learn more about the game.
IRL
IRL building is characterized by building bots that could be made and could work in real life. Often they are poor battlers compared to most other bots because of lack of wedges or good weapons, but they are mostly built for looks.
Figurehead: MikeNCR, Followers: Thyrus, dragonsteincole