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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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The Evolution of the Combat Environment
(oops, its another mega-post, sorry guys, I just type too quick. I hope its worth reading to you all )
I may have made this point before, but with the track-bonus rearing its head again (stand by for the expected walker bonus to pop up any moment ! ) I'd like to re-raise it here and get some current thoughts from people on it.
My opinion on the reason people want bonuses for non-wheeled drive systems is that there is no question that for a hard, flat surface, that anything is presently more weight/cost effective than the good old wheel. If there was, I'm sure your local car manufacturer would be onto it, No one has come up with anything better in the last couple of thousand years of trying. even to the point where the saying about "trying to reinvent the wheel" has become ubiquituous.
So, given that we are playing a game of Robotic Evolution here, and the form will always evolve to suit the function, as long as we maintain our hard-flat arena, the wheel will remain supreme.... So if we want to encourage people to build machines with novel drive systems (tracks, legs, hovercraft, whatever), then instead of trying to fudge the rules with exceptions which will just encourage people to try and take advantage of them, the answer is..
To change the combat environment !
If we gradually add sand-pits, lumpy terrain, mud-patches, gravel, grass, speed humps, ramps and so on, you can bet your bolts that the infamous two wheeled ground scraping wedge will quickly go the same way that the dinosaurs did. ie. as soon as there is a *benefit* to having tracks or legs in the arena, rather than a handicap, people will build them in order to help them win the match, rather than just look cool.
Now, obviously we dont want to immediately obsolete all you guys who are just getting your first bot going and piss you off, so I'm not proposing we turn the arena into the amazonian jungle straight away.. but Gary (Rotwang) has come up with a good idea that I'd like to see what people think of as a potential addition to the next RoboWars Event.
a "King of the Hill" Competition !
(In addition to the normal battles).
We propose constructing some type of a moveable "hill" that we can plonk down in the middle of the arena for some rounds, with a flat platform on top, where the object will be for the competitors to climb the hill and maintain their position on the top, whilst defending their place from the challengers. - Push them off, flip them, beat them back with your hammer, knock them off with your spinner (but dont knock yourself off as well !) or whatever you like. At the end of the round, the robot with the most cumulative time spent on the top of the hill, wins the match.
This is an easy piece of terrain to construct from wood (exact dimensions and ramp angles to be discussed), and paint up, and place and remove quickly between rounds. All it should require for most bots is a bit of an increase in ground clearance to negotiate the ramps, and it seems like a fun way of having a round where 4 or more bots could duke it out for the title of "King of the Hill"
We have more plans to gradually introduce more varieties of "terrain" over the long term and keep the competition evolving, fresh and innovative, rather than everyone here just duplicating what the poms and yanks are up to and trying to build a more powerful wedge/spinner/whatever. Eventually, we'd like to be able to hold a full outdoor 4WD battle. but for now, this would make a good start.
Repeating, it would not be in *ALL* the rounds, the normal compeition would still exist as well for those who dont want to play this game, but if enough people like the idea and think their existing bot could handle it, or could be adapted to do
so, lets have some comments
here and we'll see about getting it organised for our next event.
Evolve, Adapt, Survive or Die..
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Fri Jun 18, 2004 8:56 am |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Actually I thought of the multi-terrain arena quite a while back after observing the perennial whinging about wedges on the BattleBots Tech Forum, but I'll admit we stole the King of the Hill idea from Robot Arena 2
That was one of the things I really enjoyed about that game, was the huge variety of arena's to play in, and thats something I'd like to eventually head towards with some Robot Combat events in Australia. Quarries, Abandoned Warehouses, Scrapyards etc. lots of fun..
In fact I just fired up RA2 and had a quick game, then remembered why I stopped playing it. Once I figured out the (not likely in real life) trick of mounting a Z-Tek motor directly on the output shaft of another Z-Tek motor (doubling the effective speed), then attaching 3 sledgehammers to one of those clothes-line style rotors, and putting *two* of those combined arrangements on my heavyweight bot (called "G-Force"), the game became too easy..
a 'bot that dishes out 1000+ points of damage per hit, and quite often throws the other robot 10 feet in the air and across the arena when it hits kinda makes all the other guys seem like pushovers.. even that "Emergency" bot (which gave me hell trying to beat until I invented G-Force).
I wish they'd gotten the internet multiplayer option working properly on that game.. we could've all have some great matches.
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Fri Jun 18, 2004 12:23 pm |
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colin
Joined: 16 Jun 2004
Posts: 102
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quote:
Originally posted by MachineHead:
Maybe needs a danger element like on one side of the hill there might not be a ramp but a 2 foot drop to the floor or a hazard on one side.
I actually had an idea like this a while ago. I was thinking along the lines of a skate park, having ramps and such. I think the up-sides are that it rewards good driving (imagine being half on half off the ramp, you'll flip yourself) and it might bring in more stratergy, with the current robowars arena it looked like it was hard to do more than directly attack your oponent. Ramps and obsticles may change that. I think having a ramp that drops off is good because if your robot is robust/invertable you have an escape route, so it encourages good building. I also like the idea of being able to 'body slam' another robot.
The major down-side I see is that it could end up being cat and mouse (one robot running away), however, if I remember the scoring system properly, there is marks for aggresion, so there would be no incentive for people to do that.
The other aspect is the audience (yeah I know its not about pleasing the audience: try tell sidetracked that ) I think the public would find the addition more exciting, it will give more shape to the arena. If the ramps were fixed in place you could put cameras inside, with a lexan window on the side for an 'on field' view of the action. Or you could put lighting and/or a smoke machine in there.
(This is getting a bit ahead of the game: but you might want to consider building the ramp out of something see through, so it doesn't block the audience view, it was bad enough when the robots came right up to the edge of the arena.)
Also I think a sand pit would be really cool. At this stage it would only need to be an inch deep to really slow down wheeled robots, from memory most don't even have that clearence.
So, yeah, I support the idea. Of course I don't actually have a robot
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Fri Jun 18, 2004 2:38 pm |
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Ajax
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 17 Jun 2004
Posts: 298
Location: Sydney
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[b]Evaluation will happen[/b]
Hi all,
Robot wars are still very new to Australia and the arenas are not cheap to build. There for we are going to have to use what is available, to try and keep the price down. This will mean that most events will be on uneven floors and the bots are going to have to manage with this.
With this in mind, most bots will be able to compete in an event like ‘King of the Hill’, which I think is a great idea and could be run in between main events, to allow more time for competitors to fix there bots for the finals. As the finals is where the most time delays between events are going to occur.
Other events could be ‘Tag Teams’, ‘Last Bot Standing’, ‘Tug a War’, etc
The only thing that you would need to be careful of is the Hill, making sure it is not to steep, the platform at the top is not too small or too large. But knowing Spockie for as long as I have, and knowing Gary (Rotwang), I don’t think this would be a problem.
The arena should be up to the organiser of the event, if they have or don’t have obstacles.
Now we don’t want to get to over board with obstacles as this can create other problems with Bots. But if we introduce them slowly, like Spockie has stated, the Bots will involve in design as the obstacles are introduced.
On the other note about the rules for the bots, if they stay very close if not the same as the US & UK, (which look very similar) we are able to go to the US or UK and compete. And they can come to Australia and compete, with out having the make major changes to the Bot.
Cheers _________________ It's all about the destruction.
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Fri Jun 18, 2004 2:55 pm |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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annihlation would have to *get* to the top before it could sit there and spin.
IF it could manage the angles of the ramps, AND not knock itself off the side from reaction whenever it hit whoever was already there (to push them off), AND then stay there when someone else hit it, then it would still be vulnerable to a spike or something since they would be coming up *under* the rotor as they climbed the ramp.
I dont think a FBS would be the ideal robot to dominate a king-of-the-hill comp.
BTW, The way I always interpreted a Full-Body-Spinner was to mean that the whole "body" (not necessarily the chassis) of the robot rotated, essentially making it impossible to hit it anywhere without getting hit yourself. By that definition, Mauler, Shrederator and Annihlation are FBS'ers.
I suppose you could call them "Shell Spinners" or something like that, and reserve the term Full Body Spinners for bots like Tesla's Torando or Y-Pout and the like..
Twack-Bot always makes me smile.. I thought it was Thwack-Bot. Twack just sounds too much like Twat-Bot to me..
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Fri Jun 18, 2004 4:30 pm |
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