As the title suggests, this will go over the journey of Vanquish through one of the most brutal competitions the country has to offer.
Vanquish is what I would consider to be my flagship robot, my first bot built just about a year ago now, with the basic premise of kill faster than I can fall in the pit. Vanquish has become rather well known for the quality of its hits and its distaste for floors, putting many gauges and cracking many chassis of some of the better robots the UK has to offer.
On with the event recap, first on the list for today is GROCS 6. This event runs the fight night format into single elimination, with quite the roster of experienced builders and dangerous robots. The 4 pits of the arena prove incredibly dangerous to Vanquish due to it’s big disk energy, and with the amount of very forky control bots I didnt have the highest of hopes for a good placement. Either way the comp was coming and Vanquish was ready regardless.
First off is a fight against Mace Swindu, a overhead flail bot, unfortunately this fight ended before it began with a bad solder joint taking out my weapon before even touching Swindu, it was then a rather boring pushing match until the clock ran down, the crowd then awarded the win to Mace Swindu.
Now 0-1, and keen to make up for lost score, my next opponent was a small, well built vertical spinner named Rotato, theoretically quite a good matchup for the reach vert, but chance is always a huge factor with vanquish, and well it wasnt on my side. Fight started with a small shove and my weapon grinding on the side of Rotato, we then went weapon to weapon which gently flipped the small vert and caused Vanquish to, to no-ones surprise, hit the floor. This hit on the floor then resulted in a few more bounces around the box until it found itself OOTA. Not a great showing so far, with practically no damage delivered or taken, and very little spectacle.
Now sunk to 0-2, with the chances of making it to the bracket fleeting, Collision Course was up next, a fellow larger than average spinner, with the bigger reach and more punishing weapon I was confident in my ability to win, assuming Vanquish behaves, which was not the case the majority of the time for this revision of the bot and all its predecessors. Fight starts off with us both spinning out weapons, Vanquish makes a slow waltz over to Collison Course, and then strikes the motor guard in a moderately sized hit, turning it into shrapnel. This impact caused both of us to fly away at speed, this time with Vanquish on the right side of a OOTA. (Sorry for the bad pic)
Now at 1-2, Vanquish moves on to fight Tongue Twister, an SVRN kit piloted by a skilled driver, going with the lifter config and its long forkage there was little hope of me landing a clean hit. Out of the gate Tongue Twister goes in for a semi successful box rush, after a little bit of shoving and running from Tongue Twister, Vanquish then catches the underside of the flipper arm mid retraction, this proceeded to do absolutely nothing to Tongue Twister, and this sent Vanquish on a tour of the box, managing to visit every single wall, the roof, and finally simmering down in the OOTA zone. A crushing and predictable loss but was rather entertaining, so I cannot complain.
At 1-3, Vanquish’s only hope would be the playoff rumble. My final fight night opponent would be Sharpie, driven by the announcer of the event william. Sharpie is a pusher with a sharpie of varying colours that is laced with a deadly neuro toxin (citation needed). With my bot not being composed of many organic parts I didnt fear damage, but the brick can keep ticking and i wasnt going to be staying in the arena long. It was the bot I wanted to fight all event, but with my poor drive and RNG based weapon, i didn’t think i was going to get away with this one. A shocking tame fight overall, it composed mostly of Vanquish tap dancing due to gyro, and again poor drive, with sharpie seemingly struggling with it’s own mobility issues, midway through the fight the lethal pen was promptly disintegrated, painting the arena wall and the tip of my weapon a dark green. The fight ended with sharpie getting a decent push on me then succumbing to the pit.
Overall a pretty terrible showing from vanquish, 2-3 with only 1 semi impressive / interesting win.
On to the qualifier rumble where Vanquish performed extremely well, punting a small face spinner into the ceiling and OOTA, it came down to me and my round 3 opponent Collison Course, after a number of decent hits, one of my own sent me to the roof and CC temporarily stopped working, before they could be fully counted out they came back to life, I hit them, and shocker Vanquish goes clean out of the arena.
Out of the tournament and after much silliness in the rumbles, which saw Vanquish send Fatal Deviant sky high straight into the pit, I then promptly joined it after a break dancing session on the steel floor which would make the Aussies jealous, ruining Ben’s lovely floor in the process.
After this frankly upsetting performance Vanquish proceeded to get some stability upgrades, preparing it for a deep run in both AWS 77 and ORCS 12, event reports to come soon on them if anyone interested.
Thanks for reading this long winded summary, if you’ve got any questions i’m happy to answer them