Lancelot vs plasma

Any shield bot can be hit in their soft underbelly. That means their flanks (or sides), back, top, and bottom. In other words, the shield protects only what it protects. If you can get an angle around the shield, then you can hit it and damage it. This is pretty much like in the real world and there is physics involved. In the real world, a knight that is fully armoured in plate mail would still have an Achilles heel from arrow fire. An arrow can hit thru the eye hole and hurt the knight. For the shield bots i.e. Rhino, Lance, Galahad, etc., the same thing applies in terms of how to hit them. That is why bullet weapons can hurt a Lance without breaking the shield.

The Rhino has the strongest shield out of the shield bots, even stronger than the Galahad (at the same level). Galahad's single shield is stronger than one of Lancelot's shield, but the Lancelot has 3 shields to compensate. If you look closely at enemy Lancelots, you can see when their shield has broken. I have always seen the center shield broken first on reds, so that is the most probable answer for which one of your shields has broken. If you have a teammate on comms or you are sitting next to them, then you can face your bot towards them and ask them which shield is broken if you are really curious. I don't know how the firing pattern works, so I can only speculate on how to use the three shields. The easiest way is to use cover and try to cover up your exposed body and use your side shields this way. I have heard about the trick with trying to tilt your bot towards them to use one of your side shields, but I just started using this trick this week and don't know how effective it is. One caveat is not to turn too much else you will actually expose your flank to them. I haven't gotten the angle down yet, so I am mostly concentrating on the screen to see if the blast hit my shield or my flank. You can tell if you're being hit if you look at the screen, although it's hard to know if they are actually hitting the side shield or middle shield.  I guess if I record my games, I can replay them and see once they break my middle shield. Of course, you can't aim and block at the same time (unless you're using Hydras), so you should apply this trick when reloading. The third way is pure speculation. If you fire into a wall, you will see the firing pattern on the wall and it spreads out a little. I am assuming since there is physics in this game, that the same firing pattern will apply when aiming at bots even if plasma weapons tend to aim for the center of the bot. Each bot has a different weapon configuration with slots on their shoulders, sides, left, right, center, etc. For example, weapons on top or on shoulders, have a higher chance of clearing terrain or obstacles like shooting over a hill while lower mounted weapons will hit the hill. If you apply this logic to shields, then your right weapon will hit to their left side more. I haven't been able to verify this during the heat of battle and look at my firing pattern (maybe impossible with the added flash and explosions).  One way to take advantage of this would be to disable their weapons. How to do this? Again, use physics. On a Rhino with a shield up, I have noticed if you are firing on their right flank, usually their right weapons will pop up first. Anyways, you do see all kinds of weird ways of attacking, and robots climbing up on top of each other to shoot at their heads, to Carnage Thunders poking thru the shield of a Rhino and killing it, being able to fire thru walls, etc. 

The Lancelot has ridiculously long arms so you can do pretty silly things. I've tried to spoon a fellow Galahad for cover, while my arms reach around and fire at reds. It's like the Galahad was perfectly designed for this task. On Springfield, the big concrete support columns holding up the bridge from the farm side to the city side, you can actually wrap your arms around one of them and still fire at the enemy which I just tried today and got a big chuckle out of it. Of course that cylinder structure or silo at the head of the bridge on the farm side is a favorite of many already. In general, I never try to take on more than one bot at a time if I can help it. Try to isolate the bots by moving behind cover. I can't really explain this to you, but try to use buildings and terrain so that only one bot has an angle on you. If you can't do this, then stay behind cover and wait for help or for one of the enemies to make a mistake. You might have to disengage one set of enemies, and then attack someone entirely fresh and new. Don't get into tunnel vision or bloodlust and think you have to chase and kill off one guy just because he is low on health. If you have to face multiple reds, use one of them as cover so that he is between you and the other red who is in back. This way, the red further back will fire into the back of his ally if he is using plasma. Sometimes they don't even realize there is physics and just see the red box on their screen. 

A lot of the same things apply to the Rhino. If piloted well, a Rhino's shield will be very hard to break and it will last a long time. It's even more important to isolate the pilots i.e. go for the lone wolf red. Stay away from splash, from DB griffins and out of range of Trident Furies.