Robot Wars (Beware Spoilers)

Martin

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Robot Wars is my favorite TV show ever (and something I grew up watching), so back last summer when series 8 started airing I was psyched as all hell. Now that we are onto series 9, I'm just as hyped about it as I remember being as a kid. Feel free to discuss the series as it airs here.

Series 9 Standings
Robots competing: Aftershock, Crank-E, Jellyfish, Nuts 2, Rapid, Sabretooth, Terrorhurtz, TMHWK

Round 1
  • Jellyfish vs Nuts 2 vs Rapid vs Terrorhurtz: Rapid and Terrorhurtz qualified
  • Aftershock vs Crank-E vs Sabretooth vs TMHWK: Aftershock and Sabretooth qualified

Head-to-Head battles
  • Sabretooth vs Terrorhurtz: Sabretooth won by KO
  • Aftershock vs Rapid: Aftershock won by KO (After this battle, Team Rapid forfeited, and were replaced by Jellyfish)
  • Aftershock vs Sabretooth: Aftershock won by KO
  • Terrorhurtz vs Jellyfish: Terrorhurtz won by KO
  • Aftershock vs Terrorhurtz: Aftershock won by KO
  • Jellyfish vs Sabretooth: Jellyfish won by Judges' decision
Heat Final
  • Aftershock vs Sabretooth: Aftershock won
Robots competing: Behemoth, Cherub, Cobra, Draven, Eruption, Hobgoblin, PP3D, Push to Exit

Round 1
  • Behemoth vs Cobra vs Eruption vs Hobgoblin: Behemoth and Eruption qualified
  • Cherub vs Draven vs PP3D vs Push to Exit: Cherub and PP3D qualified

Head-to-Head Battles
  • Behemoth vs Eruption: Eruption won by KO
  • Cherub vs PP3D: Cherub won by Judges' decision
  • Cherub vs Eruption: Eruption won by KO
  • Behemoth vs PP3D: Behemoth won by KO
  • Eruption vs PP3D: Eruption won by KO
  • Cherub vs Behemoth: Cherub won by Judges' decision
Heat Final
  • Cherub vs Eruption: Eruption won
Episodes 3-6 are yet to air

===================
Jellyfish was such a badly designed robot that I'm amazed that they managed to win Judges' decision against Sabretooth, granted it ultimately didn't matter because Jellyfish annihilated by Aftershock as expected and Sabretooth got through by default. Speaking of Sabretooth, this is a very scary looking machine which ultimately just falls short to the sheer ferocity of Aftershock's vertical spinner despite the fact that it debatably has the more destructive weapon. It'll be back as a wildcard but I'm generally very impressed by both of the finalists' machines.
Much more eventful week than the very short games that made up the majority of week 1, and overall it was a better competition. First heat went to finals in a superb fight, Cherub's driver showed a high level of competence despite how young he is (at first I thought they played extremely badly and just wanted to show off the handstand versus Eruption, but afterwards when they explained the wheel wasn't turning I dropped my criticism of the decision), PP3D showed one of the biggest issues with horizontal spinners in that impacts take a much heavier toll on the machine than vertical spinners do. Eruption tossing someone out of the ring in every heat as well as the finals was immensely impressive--it's the first time I think I've seen anything toss Behemoth out of the ring (I may be forgetting) which really caught me off guard--and I am definitely going to be paying close attention to them in the grand finals. Flippers are dominant as ever, with them regularly showing their consistency even if it is very limiting with regards to design decisions. Probably the thing which shocked me the most, however, was the really bad decision making from Team Behemoth going into the fight against Cherub. They had literally no reason at all to use the jaw as opposed to the flipper, and the driver was right to storm off at the end 'cause it just showed a lot of incompetence for such an important match from what should be one of the most tactically honed teams in the tournament.
 
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Martin

A monoid in the category of endofunctors
is a Smogon Discord Contributoris a Forum Moderator Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Contributor Alumnus
kinda late 'cause the series ended like 2 weeks ago, but weapon tier list 'cause i like doing these

S: Horizontal Spinner, Vertical Spinner, Flipper
A: Drum Spinner
B: Axes/Hammers, Clusterbots
C: Crushers
D: Grabbers and Everything else
E: Lifting forks
F: Jellyfish's Magnets

Spinners proved to be completely broken so I shouldn't need to elaborate too much there. Flippers are also very, very good and are very, very consistent, although damage to them that affects their alignmentcan prove fatal due to how they affect ground clearance. The ability to turn a match around by knocking something out of the arena is an incredibly useful panic button to have.

Drum spinners are devistatingly powerful but are fucked if they get damaged.

Axes and hammers suffer that issue of being extremely hard to hit and being high risk/low reward. Missing can be catastrophic due to the potential for the arm to be damaged combined with it leaving a period of vulnerability (something which flippers can handle with much more ease due to the weapon being much harder to punish), and their high single-hit damage just gets eclipsed by the multi-hit or flinging potential that spinners and drum spinners have.

Clusterbots have a huge amount of un-tapped potential imo; I think having two identical spinnerbots (think Gemini if it used spinners rather than flippers) with low ground clearance that can corner opponents and tear them to shreds could prove to be very dangerous when backed by two drivers with good co-ordination (something which can be trained without needing to fight robots by playing a game such as SSB doubles), but the big thing with that is that the weight limit severely limits the potential size--and therefore power--of the spinner, so being able to minimise the size/weight of the main body to allow for the spinner to be as big and heavy as possible would be the biggest challenge for that kind of machine. It's like going in with two mediumweight/lightweight machines to take on the big boys in heavyweight, which ultimately means that you don't stand a chance if you can't surpass its high skill flaw.

Crushers are just too slow to really do anything in my opinion. Even without their strategic flopping at the start of last season, I don't think Razor holds up anywhere near as well as it used to just because its crusher functions way too slowly and it doesn't self right fast at all. If they were able to power up the motor which powered the crusher then they could probably bump up to B, but I think that a Razor with a faster crusher is the only really viable design for crushers in the metagame at this stage.

Grabbers are just straight up unviable imho 'cause they don't really have any damage potential, being directly outclassed by crushers for that reason and very rarely doing anything at all. The necessity to time it correctly is the massive killer for them though, and I doubt they'll ever be consistent.

Lifting forks are a meme; Cherub wasn't designed for combat really, and I think it was saved by a combination of Behemoth's tactical flopping (it should have been a free win but they used a FUCKING USELESS GRABBER to fight it) and the fact that the kid driving it was an actually good driver. I think that its weapons are basically unviable 'cause they have no real way of combatting flippers and they just work way too slowly.

Jellyfish's weapon was somehow even more useless than Cherub's weapon; you can't win outside of a judges decision, and it only really has any kind of semi-ok-ish matchups versus drum spinners (and even then it's kinda bad) and I guess probably Cherub too.
 

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