Heyo. Spinner-types have and always will be meta. I was having a discussion with a friend recently about what types beat each other. I thought undercutters were best due to their compact, ligher weight and durable designs and you can mount the weapon directly to the motor to avoid having a chain/belt snap.
But they thougth that vertical spinners or drisks were the current meta.
In practice, I can’t think of anything that actually beats a well designed vertical spinner; one that is invertable and has low clearance.
I have been out of the game for a good few years, so wanted some input from a few different people to hear what would be the worst thing that your bots would face if you had to choose.
I mostly run a hammer saw with longs forks, combat 4wd verts are one of my favourite matchups since i can normally control the match and since they are so compact any hit tends to take out something important. or if i dont i dont tend to take that much damage. for me the worst kind of bots are ones are resist being controlled. like large horizontals or big wheeled bots as its difficult for me to pin and lineup a shot
All depends on the approach really and I’ll echo the comments about rock paper scissors. I think the best way to think about beating a meta design (whatever it may be but it’s gonna be a forky vert for a while) is simply building something tough and reliable and driving it well.
While my driving leaves much to be desired, I do take some small pride in my robot and wiring being able to help roof’d multiple times in a flight and keep on going. Being able to outlast is a viable strategy.
Leaning too hard on combating one specific design is going to pull you away from being able to deal with a wide range of opponents. Say you have a sure fire way of negating verts. Sod’s law says you won’t get drawn against a single one.
That’s really interesting to hear. I mostly watched the old robot wars (UK version) in the early 00’s and any active weapon back then that wasn’t a spinner was basically just decoration. Wasn’t aware that overhead saws were actually useful these days, especially with the advancements in armor.
It is rock paper scissors but there’s 7 different types of tock, and paper can beat scissors if you say it in a certain way. In other (and more confusing) words, granite beats paper, which loses to lined paper and scissors, and those scissors can take down basalt if you run with them whilst its pointing left.
In my very very limited experience, I’ll agree with Harry - something that can take a hit and that is driven better than the opponent is your best bet against meta bots (from what I’ve seen - I’ve never won a fight) or something that’s so out of the box that no one knows how to counter it.
Overhead weapons are my nightmare (hence why I built one!) because usually you would armour up mostly around the sides, as that’s where most robots will hit you, but any kind of overhead spinner will go straight into your thinner top armour (in my case making it impossible for me to drive inverted)
An overhead hammer spinner sound like the aboslute worst thing to go up against, but at the same time good god that is probably a lot of weight into the weapon mechanism. As meta as that concept seems, I dread to think of the time investment that goes into something like that
As others have said it’s all a bit rock paper scissors.
I’d also echo the “build what ever feels cool to you” sentiment. Like my first spinner beetle: The Chilli Daddy was designed to be a little unconventional and difficult to hard counter via set ups. This was something that I found interesting and compelling. Find a design that sparks that interest for you (what ever it may be) and just go for it IMHO.
got a build log of the bot on here actually if your interested (Dolos mk3 build diary - #8 by morgan_ls) but TLDR you dont have to put too much weight into a hammer saw to get it effective, the whole weapon system probably weighs like 400 grams which is less than some verts, this is because most people have thinner armour on the top anyway and even if they armour up there’s still exposed parts like a link or belts to hit. but they are tricky to drive and when it goes wrong my bot tends to take a battering
Whilst there clearly is a meta, I suppose you can’t really say because almost everyone just doesn’t care about it. Almost all roboteers make whatever “their thing” is, like how almost everything the team behind Behemoth made is some form of said robot or whatever comes to them, like how rock and robots host Eli Gumble has all sorts of weird unrelated robots.
Lol lots of people follow the meta, you can see that if you look at tournament signups.
On topic, my primary robot is a beetleweight hammer I designed to look cool and be fun. I didn’t design any long forks into it as I think they look ugly, and therefore it’s lost to basically anything with ground game, so my nightmare matchup is basically ‘anything with forks especially if it’s a vert’ which a loooot of robots are
What I’ve learned this last year or so is the ‘build what’s cool to you’ advice is the best advice as long as you won’t get frustrated being beaten by someone that has built a meta bot because that’s what’s cool to them.
I’m a big fan of building very compact 4WD verts and for me the worst case scenario is always long reaching overcutter horizontals. Getting hit hard on the side of the weapon uprights is never good for the bot. The other Kyrptonite is overhead saws with long forks.
