What makes it boring is that the engineers optimize for the arena, and the arena is boring.
They made it an almost perfectly flat metal surface with no features of any kind. Robot Wars was more interesting. Not only did they have house robots which looked like The Shrieking Maimer, the arena was also more interesting with pits, house robots, flame areas, etc.
IMO a more interesting arena would lead to more interesting battles, especially if the arena weren’t perfectly flat so it wasn’t optimal to have one that had a 2mm clearance. Even better would be if you had a variety of arenas, and the contestants didn’t know until the day of the battle which one they’d be in. Some might be flat, some might have a water hazard, some might have sand, some might have a dirt floor. Then you’d have more walking robots, more tank-tread robots, etc. so they could tackle a variety of terrain.
This always baffled me. It really was so lazy and boring with the sets. It is weird when you think about how they had all those creative engineers making frickin’ killbots at their disposal. Let them eat… But no, just flat areas and stupid hammers and floor saws too slow and weak to do anything… so everyone makes indestructible wedges to push other bots up on the edge, or a spin-hammer that is undefeatable.
Yeah, the saws and hammers in Battlebots might have been a good idea, if they actually did anything. I can’t remember them ever having a decisive effect on a fight. Given the armor of the bots, it was like using a feather on them.
A pit, on the other hand, can end a fight. Frequently in Robot Wars, a really good robot lost by being pushed into a pit. Having said that, a pit doesn’t discourage wedge robots or flippers. It only slightly discourages spinners because they sometimes aren’t easy to control.
I’d just rather have a wavy / bumpy or otherwise uneven surface so that a low-to-the-ground design might get stuck.
In a sense, I understand why they designed the arena the way they did. It’s extremely uniform so it’s the same for every competitor. If it’s damaged in some way it’s easy to put it back the way it was. People can make their own versions at home so they can test their robot in a similar arena. It’s basically trying to avoid having the arena itself become a decisive factor in any battle and leave the winning or losing to the robots. But, by doing that they lead to all robots being boring and optimized for that one arena. That means a battle over who can have the tightest possible ground clearance tolerance.
I want wheels, legs, tracks, not ground-huggers. So, I don’t want perfectly even, perfectly level, perfectly boring arenas. I want arenas that will challenge bots. Ideally, I’d like one where there are different sections of the arena. Maybe there’s a “plains” section where the low-to-the-ground bots have an advantage, but then there’s a “hilly” section (even if it’s just a steel floor with some dents bashed into it) where you’re screwed if you designed a bot that has a clearance that’s too low. Then you might have certain bots trying to make sure the battle happens in their section of the arena. That adds interesting strategy.
another easy fix would be to let the audience vote on style, so a sufficiently awesome robot can win so long as it does okay in the fights.
The problem with that is that the matches tend to be win or lose, and end when one of the robots is unable to continue. If you lose but the audience votes for you, does that mean the winner doesn’t get to proceed?
Chaos 2 and Hypnodisk fucked up so many fools. Made so many child competitors cry by destroying their bots utterly.
Literally a wok attached to a lawn mower engine with blades welded on. Undefeated. Disqualified for being “too dAnGEwoUS”.
This was Jamie Hyneman, and Adam Savage’s robot (of MythBusters fame). It was given the championship 2 seperate years in exchange for not competing anymore, as you said, because it was too dangerous and flinging robot parts over the arena walls.
Just here to specify that “over the arena walls” is quite literal since the first arena didn’t have a ceiling. The flung pieces were thrown into the public, luckily never injuring anybody.
Shouldn’t the entire arena be in plexiglass so parts can’t fly over walls?
Today it wouldn’t be an issue, but this was the early 90s and the areas didn’t have a roof yet or heavy windows.
never trust protective glass when hyneman is involved in any way.
yeah, but i’ve seen that shatter too
If it’s good enough for the sides, it should work for the top
The arenas I’ve been to are closed at the top now, but might not have been back when this happened.
Battlebot design is like crab evolution they all end up as fast wedges or spinny things with covered wheels and minimal ground clearance.
It’s fun when a novel design has success though.
Smaller light weight bots are a lot more creative in my experience. (Drills, torches, etc).
Comically nowadays it would be essentially useless. Full body spinners have fallen so far behind in the meta that they’re practically a joke.
I haven’t watched the robot fighting shows in a decade, why are full spinners trash in the meta now?
They’re more likely to destroy themselves than their opponents. Equal and opposite reaction and all that. The kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and if an opponent is well armored and planted, the full-body spinner will go flying and then bounce around the arena doing damage to itself.
(All spinners are somewhat susceptible to this, but full-body spinners are the most susceptible.)
You can clearly see the blades are bolted on, not (just) welded.
Welding would ruin the temper of the steel, bolting also allows them to be changed when they dull… or so, I’ve been told.
Meh only ruin it at like the weld area. Besides lawn mower blades aren’t that hard anyways. And a lick of a grinder will sharpen them
Tell me they called it the Wok of Death or something similar.
Blendo, if I recall correctly
Could’ve been defeated with a net but those are banned, or a bucket of clay, but is also banned.
A high-gain EM jammer also, but those are banned.
A fine graphite powder, banned.
Thermal lance? Banned.
.50 BMG round? Banned.No one gets to have any fun…
pocket-sand!
The shrieking maimer thudding it’s hammer on the ground uselessly as it moves listless across the battlefield in an attempt to line up it’s very small, periodic, area of effect towards the enemy. The nudge moving at Mach go-fuck-yourself in a b-line for center mass, sliding effortlessly under and launching the shrieking maimer into a sky until it turns into a star like Team Rocket.
It even works in video games. If anybody remembers Robot Rage on Miniclip. My strategy for that game was not to buy any weapons, but to buy the thickest armour and the biggest battery and ram into the other guy. Worked almost every time.
Incidentally, that’s also my technique for the art of lovemaking.
Gotta play to the rules.
If the arena was designed differently, a wedge wouldn’t do very well. It’d be a much different game if there were stairs involved.
Extra parts means extra failure points. The Nudge is just KISS on steroids.
Check out Daniel Sloss and his dads experience of Robot Wars in the UK
if you want to see this in action, obwalden overlord vs warhead is a good match.
And Warhead is still pretty over-the-top. Giant dragon head and flamethrowers. A more utilitarian bot, like Tombstone or Minotaur, would have won even more easily.
yeah vs minotaur that match would probably have been over on the first hit. but again, the spectacle is important.
Thanks for the rec!
Exactly this. Overlord’s primary weapons and defense were held on by relatively thin and delicate arms that Warhead just broke almost instantly with the first bite.
A simple and sturdy design is hard to beat.
What were they thinking? That real robot battles look like those in cartoons?
they went for entertainment value. the higher you get in the bracket the more samey the fights tend to get. optimizing for performance alone would make for a boring show.
Roadblock my beloved.
KISS principle
