(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..

Hmm interesting. Kinda like the idea, reminds me of a game on me mac, yes macs have games, i have both of them. 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. Size of bots might be the issue in that a bot like killbot might have the disadvantage of being big where on a hill situation low density bots would rule i thinks. But yeah keep the ideas going
_________________
Bots that do not destroy you, only make you stronger.

Sounds like someones being playing Robot Arena 2 . I know I have .
You're king of the hill sounds just like the one in the game and I wouldn't mind giving it a go. I know Adversary has no trouble with rough terrian when I took it for a trip though the garden at my place (the sterring was backward at that stage ).
As long as you don't try that Table Top arena thats mounted on springs I'll give any multi-surfaced arena a go.
_________________
Get Some!!!

Secretary of the Queensland Robotics Sports Club inc.

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.

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.

---

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.

if the idea is to disadvantage more common designs with these new environments then what is the sense of this king of the hill?, think about it, plonk anihilation (or any other FBS) on the top and good luck moving it buddy!!!
food for thought...
_________________
You Think You Know Me

I would prefer to think that it encourages nu designs rather than inconvenience older styles. It would be ideal for tracks as flat surfaces arent its proper domain and would probably encourage more 4 wheeled bots. Lets face it does anyone feel we should be building more wedges. As a track builder i would build a bot just for terrain and have my other another for flats. not everyone wants 2 bots but we shouldnt be held back because of wedges. As it would be completely seperate from the main competition dont see why anyone would have any obs. What does FBS strand for Axe murderer? what a friendly name
_________________
Bots that do not destroy you, only make you stronger.

FBS = Full Body Spinner
I don't agree that Annihilation is a Full Body Spinner as its body dosn't spin. I know people also call robots like Shredderator and Mauler full body spinners too, but yet again the main body of the robot doesn't spin. Twack-bots are their own little catergary, so the only full body spinners I can think of strainght up are Tesla's Tornado and Cyclone Bot.
Any way I think a robot like Shredderator would either kill the floor or itself when it first hits the incline. Annihilation wouldn't make it either.
_________________
Get Some!!!

Secretary of the Queensland Robotics Sports Club inc.

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..

Whoops, soory.
And what do you know, the "h" is in the middle of the key board too.
_________________
Get Some!!!

Secretary of the Queensland Robotics Sports Club inc.

...that's what I forgot to say. These extra things tend to limit the type of bots you can build. As has now been discussed. I think this is the down fall for the all terrain arena. It will remove wedges, but it'll probably also remove flippers and certain spinner designs.

here is a rule i think kinda defines the situation:

complexity of the robot is proportional to the complexity of the arena

I LOVE the idea. I would gladly knock up a 4 wheel drive robot or a certain shape and description and have a go.

One idea though is tohave a normal combat event and a seperate event for terraion etc. like robotica
_________________
Andrew Welch, Team Unconventional Robotics

purely as a personal opinion i still like my 1 on 1 plain combat, i still get a big adrenalin rush each fight

the concept itself seems interesting, as for the actual king of the hill it seems as though that event will just be dominated by a 6wd beast like singularity with a ton-o-ground clearance.

i wouldnt like to see something like that replace the plain old combat, because if it does - the new, young guys just wont have a chance if making the robots more complex and crazy is the aim (complex to me is the worst type of robot imaginable anywho..)

conversly, if its a side event, i can see this idea catching on!

The hil thing sounds good to me it will create something different we already learnt the lesson about ground clearance after geting stuck on the welds on the Arena floor at Side tracked in Melburne with two of our robots so now all our robots have a lot more ground clearance .Anhilation is basicly a spinning bar robot not a full body spinner. Thanks for the warning Brett.... we might just have to find a few ramps and things and do some testing mabee take our bots to the gympie skate park and do some hill climbing to try them out i think T2m should be ok with is better traction not sure about the rest the hammer has good ground clerarance so it might be ok as well Heamorage might turn turtle with its high centre of gravity though lol