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Pretty unhype finals for me. I've been rooting for something other than a vertical spinner to make it to the finals or even top 4 and for the 3rd season, the bracket became a vertfest even without Bite Force. It's done. Battlebots is gonna die unless something can happen to spice up the metagame imo.
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Mar 15, 2021 04:35
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So what're people watching while Battlebots is off-season?
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Mar 15, 2021 10:48
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Bodyholes posted:Pretty unhype finals for me. I've been rooting for something other than a vertical spinner to make it to the finals or even top 4 and for the 3rd season, the bracket became a vertfest even without Bite Force. It's done. Battlebots is gonna die unless something can happen to spice up the metagame imo. That seems wildly hyperbolic. It seems widely agreed that End Game got lucky with the way the other matches played out, and even if vertical spinners are top dog, they're entertaining to watch and when they're built like End Game you get knock-outs and bots being thrown out of the arena more often than not, which I'm sure is pretty unashamedly the goal of the whole sport.
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Mar 15, 2021 10:59
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Yeah, I'm the biggest proponent of rules changes to make certain types of bot viable (EG: Weight bonus for hammer bots that must be spent on weapon) but if you thought that finale wasn't a banger you weren't watching properly. Black Dragon spent two entire minutes on fire. Hydra got knocked the gently caress out. Endgame took Whiplash to pieces. I get the impulse to be like, "God it's another spinner winning again", but when you've watched a bunch of other robot fighting shows (Robot Wars, King of Bots, or god forbid, Russian youtube videos of tournaments) you know how tragically dull robot fighting is when robots can't damage each other and everything is decided by shoving matches. At least spinners bring a reliable weapon to the table that can knock another robot out by damage alone - that's always worth watching. I'd also say Endgame's victory was far from certain. Almost everyone reckoned Hydra had it sewn up.
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Mar 15, 2021 11:19
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It's kind of interesting. For so long everyone is bringing bots able to deal with Tombstone. But it seems very few are bringing bots able to deal with the vertical spinners which have just dominated the fights all the way through. Like at some point people gotta start bringing bots that can beat the Biteforce & End Game style bots.
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Mar 15, 2021 11:53
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How do you beat them is the question. If you bring long forks to get under them you risk them being bent or torn off in a bad collision. If you bring a wide wedge you're at a disadvantage against their forks because the floor will never be perfectly flat. No wedge at all loses to their wedge or forks. If you don't want to play the ground game you end up with stuff like huge or yeti. They're very difficult designs to attack which is why they're so successful.
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Mar 15, 2021 12:42
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I think that's why we're seeing more forks/wedgelets with the idea being if you can't outwedge them, at least you could keep the spinner from engaging the main body. And to be fair, End Game wasn't even reliable until this season. Very few could have predicted it would win the championship.
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Mar 15, 2021 12:54
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Seems like the difference between top 8 and top 4 was the fork game. SawBlaze and Hydra have low fronts but they're one size fits most. Endgame, Whiplash, and Tantrum had more unique fork configurations against each individual opponent--to try to anticipate and counter their own forks. Hammersaws and Flippers can do well, clearly. There just aren't as many as the vertical spinners, and the two that got furthest lost out on the fork counter. For horizontal spinners, we had more of them than verts in top 16 and then none in top 8. In 3 fights the horizontal spinner and vertical spinner lost weapon power, but the vert was still a good wedge so it won. That will be the story again and again for bots like Tombstone, Valkyrie that really are sunk without their weapon. I think RotatoR and Bloodsport have a chance to be top contenders but their forks were just awful this year. They need to put a lot of effort into bringing them up to the level of the verts they're up against, but I liked the speed and versatility of those two. Hammers, it's the same thing... Shatter's forks were sad. Beta made some galaxy brained decisions. Bodyholes fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Mar 15, 2021 |
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Mar 15, 2021 14:25
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Seriously, it looked like endgame might lose to tantrum until the reliability issue kicked in and they got demoralized and damaged.
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Mar 15, 2021 19:04
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Gort posted:Yeah, I'm the biggest proponent of rules changes to make certain types of bot viable (EG: Weight bonus for hammer bots that must be spent on weapon) but if you thought that finale wasn't a banger you weren't watching properly. Black Dragon spent two entire minutes on fire. Hydra got knocked the gently caress out. Endgame took Whiplash to pieces. Yeah the static rammer/pushbot meta is horrifically boring and it's gonna take way more than 3 seasons of the reboot for me to somehow think a vert spinner meta is worse.
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Mar 15, 2021 19:59
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Bodyholes posted:Seems like the difference between top 8 and top 4 was the fork game. SawBlaze and Hydra have low fronts but they're one size fits most. Endgame, Whiplash, and Tantrum had more unique fork configurations against each individual opponent--to try to anticipate and counter their own forks. Hammersaws and Flippers can do well, clearly. There just aren't as many as the vertical spinners, and the two that got furthest lost out on the fork counter. I felt like Sawblaze's middle fork was constantly getting in the way. I think they beat Witch Doctor way more reliably, and probably have a much better shot against Tantrum if they just go in with a two outside fork configuration. Middle fork was getting hit by the disc and making it difficult for SB to actually get underneath, while the middle fork was just straight up losing to Tantrum's wedge the whole time.
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Mar 15, 2021 20:03
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I find myself wondering if anyone's done a milling-head bot. Like a vertical spinner, but with the spin axis running longitudinally, front-to back.
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Mar 15, 2021 20:56
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Madurai posted:I find myself wondering if anyone's done a milling-head bot. Like a vertical spinner, but with the spin axis running longitudinally, front-to back. Warhead's spinner was on a diagonal axis, I guess. Don't know if there's one that's straight on the way you're describing.
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Mar 15, 2021 21:24
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Madurai posted:I find myself wondering if anyone's done a milling-head bot. Like a vertical spinner, but with the spin axis running longitudinally, front-to back. Axe Backwards? I'm having trouble picturing what you're describing.
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Mar 15, 2021 21:49
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Most people usually propose it as a 'drill' of some sort, but a face-on vertical spinner seems to be roughly similar. The issue usually brought up is that it's very difficult to get a solid hit without some decent forward movement as well, you'd probably just get a ton of defelctions. If you made it into a full-sized disk with teeth you might be able to get some big hits from interesting angles though. The problem is that as you make it bigger into an entire spinning disk you also start getting the issue of an unbalanced sideways gyroscopic force.
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Mar 15, 2021 22:20
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I bet if you stuck it on the end of a stick and spun around like a thwack bot you could make it work.
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Mar 15, 2021 22:28
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Borsche69 posted:Yeah the static rammer/pushbot meta is horrifically boring and it's gonna take way more than 3 seasons of the reboot for me to somehow think a vert spinner meta is worse. From where I'm sitting it's the same meta. The best wedges are winning. They have to have little spinning things on top of them to enter Battlebots, but so what? Vertical spinners are just the most synergistic type of weapon to run with a wedge. Hammersaws and Flippers *can* work but these weapons are more complex and fragile, and these bots really can't have anything go wrong in their fights. If something like HUGE or Uppercut won then yeah, that would be hype. But those are not the types of verts that are winning.
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Mar 15, 2021 22:33
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Icewave bounty thoughts P1 really should have let Tracer stay stuck on the wall, but got bailed out Deadlift with the inexplicable self-destruct Not showing Hypershock v Sporkinok is entirely on brand Black Widow is a design Chuck Pitzer sounds half dead and should retire Ghost Raptor oh man Skorpios, that was a lucky non-countdown. 5 seconds earlier and P1 would have stole that Hypershock v Skorpios was the chalk pick, but a wet fart of a fight Pulvarizers actually did a crapload of damage for once, RIP Icewave
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Mar 16, 2021 02:25
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Bodyholes posted:From where I'm sitting it's the same meta. The best wedges are winning. They have to have little spinning things on top of them to enter Battlebots, but so what? Vertical spinners are just the most synergistic type of weapon to run with a wedge. Hammersaws and Flippers *can* work but these weapons are more complex and fragile, and these bots really can't have anything go wrong in their fights. It's not the same meta because in one instance, actual damage is being done. It's more interesting to watch something get thrown or hurt than it is for rammers to sort of mush eachother into walls. Weight, repair, and reliability also have to be accounted for with regards to the weapon system.
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Mar 16, 2021 05:41
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Borsche69 posted:It's not the same meta because in one instance, actual damage is being done. It's more interesting to watch something get thrown or hurt than it is for rammers to sort of mush eachother into walls. Weight, repair, and reliability also have to be accounted for with regards to the weapon system. I'm not saying I long for the days when gray boxes with wheels clumsily shoved each other around in the majority of fights. But the best fights have usually come from dynamic weapon matchups. Horizontal vs vertical spinner. Spinner vs flipper. Flipper vs hammer, and so on. There were many good fights this season because the vert meta only mattered for the top 16 and up. The round robin and the early brackets had enough variety to make an interesting season. But there was a time when you could see dynamic matchups in the finals. Even when wedges were dominant, other types of robots still made it to the finals frequently enough to keep it spicy. Now that never happens, and I think it could get worse.
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Mar 16, 2021 06:14
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I wouldn't call Whiplash much the same as Endgame. Its weapon isn't nearly as powerful and it's got that arm. If its had gotten the right timing and angle, it might've been able to flip Endgame and go to town on the undercarriage. Heck, I half-expected it to try climbing back into the arena after it got knocked out. Sawblaze did it while fighting Uppercut. And then if you look at the top 8, Ribbot was running a horizontal spinner earlier and probably shouldn't have gone vertical, Black Dragon's weapon barely was a factor, Sawblaze was a much more powerful and faster inversion of Whiplash, Shatter was a hammerbot with a unique driving system, Hydra's a pure flipper, and Tantrum is a unique super fast and small robot. There were 3 Biteforce-lookalikes going into the round of 32 and even more in the preliminaries, but Endgame is the only one that made it past the first match.
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Mar 16, 2021 07:12
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Ror posted:Most people usually propose it as a 'drill' of some sort, but a face-on vertical spinner seems to be roughly similar. The issue usually brought up is that it's very difficult to get a solid hit without some decent forward movement as well, you'd probably just get a ton of defelctions. If you made it into a full-sized disk with teeth you might be able to get some big hits from interesting angles though. The problem is that as you make it bigger into an entire spinning disk you also start getting the issue of an unbalanced sideways gyroscopic force. Hmmmm, maybe a horizontal spinner where the weapon's angle can be tilted all the way forwards so that it's spinning upright? Similar to how Whiplash has its vert spinner mounted on an arm so it can turn around and do overhead shots
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Mar 16, 2021 09:50
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The sport evolved that there's only so many weapons that teams could reliably build as well. And all the vert spinners aren't really the same type of bot. Minotaur isn't the same as Bite Force. End Game isn't the same as Whiplash. It's like saying Tombstone and Gigabyte are similar because they are horizontal spinners. Ror posted:Most people usually propose it as a 'drill' of some sort, but a face-on vertical spinner seems to be roughly similar. The issue usually brought up is that it's very difficult to get a solid hit without some decent forward movement as well, you'd probably just get a ton of defelctions. If you made it into a full-sized disk with teeth you might be able to get some big hits from interesting angles though. The problem is that as you make it bigger into an entire spinning disk you also start getting the issue of an unbalanced sideways gyroscopic force. Are you thinking of something like this? 
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Mar 16, 2021 10:11
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That'd hurl both robots sideways, which isn't that desirable. A nice thing about a vertical spinner is that it chucks the target upwards while driving you into the floor, which is a much more survivable impact than say, Tombstone hurling itself into an arena wall.
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Mar 16, 2021 11:30
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I think of Whiplash as more of a lifter than a spinner.
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Mar 16, 2021 15:12
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halokiller posted:The sport evolved that there's only so many weapons that teams could reliably build as well. And all the vert spinners aren't really the same type of bot. Minotaur isn't the same as Bite Force. End Game isn't the same as Whiplash. It's like saying Tombstone and Gigabyte are similar because they are horizontal spinners. Like that, yeah. Probably it would need the spinner to be well off-center, so you get a longer "outrigger" on the downward-force side.
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Mar 16, 2021 17:27
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Someone needs to make a heavyweight version of this bot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw9mf2d0gKQ
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Mar 16, 2021 18:03
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halokiller posted:Someone needs to make a heavyweight version of this bot: My pitch for another Battlebots spinoff would be a set of flyweight qualifying competitions across the country that fed into a main event in Vegas or something like that.
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Mar 16, 2021 18:21
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SlothfulCobra posted:And then if you look at the top 8, Ribbot was running a horizontal spinner earlier and probably shouldn't have gone vertical Apparently Ribbot's horizontal spinner got so totally hosed up by Uppercut, they had no choice but to use the vertical setup against BD. halokiller posted:The sport evolved that there's only so many weapons that teams could reliably build as well. And all the vert spinners aren't really the same type of bot. Minotaur isn't the same as Bite Force. End Game isn't the same as Whiplash. It's like saying Tombstone and Gigabyte are similar because they are horizontal spinners. But End Game and Bite Force are essentially identical. End Game is the Player 2 coloration of Bite Force.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:24
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Fish Of Doom posted:But End Game and Bite Force are essentially identical. End Game is the Player 2 coloration of Bite Force. In theory, but I've been re-watching Season 3, and Bite Force's weapon does not stop after hits. Its crazy spin-up speed is an underrated part of its success, I think. Most spinners have to back off after a big hit so they can spin up again, but Bite Force can just keep going. Most of its fights don't last a minute because it can deliver 3 big hits in like 5 seconds flat.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:30
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Fish Of Doom posted:But End Game and Bite Force are essentially identical. End Game is the Player 2 coloration of Bite Force. If Team Whyachi were actually lame they could've just built Bite Force. Instead they enter fun things like a flipper and mobile barbecue, and they just play up being asshats for TV. It's pretty obvious watching the meta from the past few seasons that the closer the robot is to Bite Force the more winninger it is. That is the optimal strategy. Battlebots has been solved. People are in denial about it but if enough legacy teams give up switch to wedge verts, Battlebots WILL be in trouble.
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Mar 16, 2021 23:12
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Though part of it is that the producers get to choose who can actually compete and intentionally encourage strange bots and reject things that are just boring clones.
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Mar 16, 2021 23:24
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Also it's not like flipper bots can't beat Vertical spinners. Hydra was scary close to beating the entire field. It took Whiplash to beat them, and Whiplash is at best a vert spinner/lifter hybrid.
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Mar 16, 2021 23:34
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Bodyholes posted:People are in denial about it but if enough legacy teams give up switch to wedge verts, Battlebots WILL be in trouble. That's essentially what Lockjaw is. It's probably the least interesting thing Donald Hutson's ever built, but he tried to do the Diesector jaw design for it in the first few seasons of the reboot before being like, "gently caress it, might as well join them". I think Ray Billings has also said that he's going to give Tombstone to his son to drive and probably build a vertical spinner, so that's a bummer.
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Mar 17, 2021 00:32
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Tombstone bounty thoughts I think flamethrowers did somehting for once; lol at KO by being ontop of a pulvarizer Smeeee v Mammoth was one hell of a gimmick fight. Still not sure how Mammoth flipped itself There might be something to Deadlift after all.That fire was effective Claw Viper really needs to stop whiffing on box rushes Deadlift bossed Gruff until their weapon got stuck. Deadlift really needs to fix their bugs and they can go places Kraken spinning Smeee around ruled. Seemed like a bad matchup for Kraken at first given a lake of bite space Gruff was a lot more dialed in for the bounty hunt compared to the end of the regular fights. Wonder what happened there? Tombstone still the King
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Mar 17, 2021 02:08
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The Glumslinger posted:Though part of it is that the producers get to choose who can actually compete and intentionally encourage strange bots and reject things that are just boring clones. That's just it. If all the bots were identical that would suck, but given the contest is very specifically designed to prevent that, it's not nearly as dire as some of you are imagining. It also comes down to the simple fact that successive seasons will trend more towards refinement. Internally End Game is fundamentally different to the old Biteforce, even if they appear similar at a glance.
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Mar 17, 2021 02:16
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Biteforce looks a lot cooler, for one
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Mar 17, 2021 03:40
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Fish Of Doom posted:That's essentially what Lockjaw is. It's probably the least interesting thing Donald Hutson's ever built, but he tried to do the Diesector jaw design for it in the first few seasons of the reboot before being like, "gently caress it, might as well join them". Even though he could change it back to the spring flipper under the new rules--which was super cool imo, I think he realized that even as a fairly middling vert whose weapon only lasts 1.5 minutes it's still probably better. We're seeing it from the Whyachi team even though I joke about it. Fusion feels like a tacit admission, from a team that used to only ever build horizontal spinners, that the best thing they think horizontal spinners can do is to just become vertical spinners. 
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Mar 17, 2021 04:20
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New Tale of the Tape ep, there's a big interview with Greg Munson from 17:18 about the possible rules changes and arena changes they might introduce in future in response to things like Hydra's cow catcher, teams choosing not to use their primary weapon and just wedgebot a fight, etc etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntvPZBjhlNw
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Mar 17, 2021 05:23
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I always assumed Fusion was basically the Wyachi team House Bot for testing Hydra against different poo poo
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Mar 17, 2021 06:55
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