So what makes a good design a good design? Other people calling it good? Winning matches? Placing 1st in CAD contests? lol. Personally I think it's a mixture of the first two. If people think it has potential and then it goes out and proves itself in the arena, then yes it's a good design. People might not like it, as in the case of rammers, but it's had the christening stages of high opinion and success.
What else makes a good design, just that? Generally rammers do well. Why do rammers do well? Well let's take a look at one of the most obvious examples: Tank. He makes use of two amazing things, and one of them is the wedge.
The wedge, man... Siphai went into this himself in the first post, but I gotta re-iterate it all. It is boring, that is a true fact. They're not flashy at all. However, they're not supposed to be. It's just that useful and a staple of robot combat ever since bots like Biohazard and Voltarc entered the arena, hell possibly even La Machine. The wedge gets under another robot and most of the time removes their ability to drive. Man, removing your opponent's mobility by suspending their wheels in the air! It's dead useful. We all know this. And this is why so many competitors, IRL or fanfic, have put wedges on their robots, because people see the fucking need for them, they recognize the usefulness of the wedge, and its ability to turn a battle around.
Now there are wedges everywhere you look, and many, many different variations on them. You have flat ones like Original Sin, scoops like Shunt of Robot Wars, forks like Complete Control, or Sewer Snake, and so on and forth. And even those categories have variants. People just find them important. So what happens when a wedge meets a wedge? Do they cancel out? Does one get under the other? Why does one wedge get under the other? Why is it better? I'm sure a lot of participants here have probably asked themselves that.
But it's true.
Going back a bit, Tank made use of wedges. Now we know by now that the wedge is a scary thing, right? It's not flashy by any means, but it can get under you, and it can at least halt your movement somewhat. Well, as a lot of rammers before and after did, Tank made use of another amazing thing: the infamous duo of drive and armour.
A wedge is a scary thing, but something heavily armoured and coming at you like light speed is also scary. Combining those things all adds up to one freakishly demonic bot, doesn't it? It can get to you instantly, it can shrug off any weapon you might have, and it'll get under you and slam you everywhere, and you know you were fucked the moment you decided to challenge this robot, as you lie there after three minutes in, a barely moving lump, a shadow of your former self, broken from all the slamming and crashing this motherfucker granted you.
However, there is also another very successful design as well, and it could be considered the arch-enemy of the rammer. That design makes use of a horizontal spinning weapon. Yep, the horizontal spinner. Granted, there are crazier variants of horizontals spinners than there are wedges, but that's obvious.
Consider the real robot, Last Rites. He has a huge spinning bar of death in front of him, ready to paste the unlucky son of a bitch that entered the arena with him, across that very arena and put them crying in a corner, mangled beyond repair. It's so devious it's beautiful. And it's also a good defense as well, because it prevents an opposing robot from simply barging in and taking control. And to cap it off even further, some of those hellish spinners add - you guessed it - wedges! To the sides, to the rear... even they see the usefulness of the wedge. Granted, most spinners don't quite benefit from having a wedge at all, as it seems they don't have the force to get under other wedges. But could they?
And consider this, a highly successful design, Hazard, and his probable HW clone, Brutality. Both of them have great weapons, but they both also had good wedges. If their weapon ran out, they could simply fall back on the wedge. And in Hazard's case he had more than enough power to push other robots around.
Let's go into more designs.
Lifters,
ah... these guys showcase a quicker way to strand your opponents, or better get under them. A lifter can do just that: lift. Or it can push itself into the ground to get the entire robot more leverage and better get under other robots. And they only need to spare a token of their weight (or in ARC's case, stats) just to get that damn lifter in there, so they could still be a beastly rammer if they wanted to. But all lifters, every single one, uses a wedge AS a lifter. What is a lifter without a wedge? A nobody, that's who, because it won't get under anything and that totally defeats the purpose of a lifter.
Flippers! You have three variants: rear-hinged, front-hinged, and from-the-side, like Mouser Mecha Catbot, or Lightning from RW7. But again, these guys are required to get under a robot to use their weaponry. How do they do it? WEDGE.
What about other spinners? Vertical spinners? There are some variants here as well. Personally I have always considered drums, beaters, etc. to be in this category. They virtually are vertical spinners, because... uhhh they spin vertically? Thin discs like Nightmare and 259 possess a lot of bite on their side, but have a lot of surface area for more practical spinners, such as horizontal spinners, to hit. This is a key reason why people bring up the horizontal vs. vertical argument, because
it is true. A horizontal spinner is pretty much always going to devastate a vertical spinner of equal strength. Drums are a bit better off, because they have a very long attack width. Unfortunately they don't get the same bite that the discs do and thus they don't exactly do as much damage... though I think Touro Maximus could convince me otherwise after demolishing Tanto like that.
Oh hey, axes! Axes are great, they are overhead weapons that take advantage of a robot's top armour and simply beat into it. Vertical crushers are in the same mold, though they are slower. Both of them, however, require a lot of power to do much damage nowadays and are fairly inaccurate anyway. Combined with the remaining weight (or stats) needed for the robot, there's a reason why you don't see as many of them.
Thwacks, horizontal crushers, I-beams, pneumatic spikes... seriously, I could go on. There are so many designs out there and pretty much every single one of them has been copied. I think the only weapon that only exists in fic is the puncher, and Probot and Force Feedback were the pioneers of that, with bots like F-Dynasty and Teresa following suit. Let's face it. Every bot is in some way going to be a clone of another. Personally, I don't care if Teresa is like a clone of Force Feedback or Stingray, or if Lethal Injection is a clone of Annoying Box Rush or if AMP is kind of a clone of IceWave or GreenWave or whatever that spinner was called. Thing is, we recognize those designs and respect them, so we kinda honour them in the silly ways that we do. Originality is a rare thing, and once something new comes, everyone is going to want to clone it.
Martijn, I think, made an excellent post regarding originality years back, as well.
And really, another thing I wanted to discuss is that, because we have so many different writers now, nobody and I mean NOBODY should ever have to bitch about a match they lose or whatever, unless there's a huge lack of common sense that's not missed by a large chunk of the community. We have different writers
because we don't want the same opinion all the time. We want to see how others feel about things. If Siphai is writing a match and thinks "Oh, Lethal Injection's lifter is better than Peppernut's, he should take better control of the fight", and has LI win, but then Badnik comes along next week, gets LI's next match and thinks "Huh, Parabolic Trajectory can outwedge this guy, Peppernut should have been able to last week", and then has LI lose, well that's all right. A lot of result writing is writer's discretion. A lot of us agree and disagree on a lot of matters, and sometimes we try and convince each other of our own opinions. Thing is, there are some things we will never agree on, and that's fine, nobody's going to agree 100% with you. And that's why bitching about it is never going to work, because you're always going to make enemies that way. So what if Teresa loses to Stabstract? Personally I think he's got me countered completely; the writer might think otherwise, or he might agree with me. And oh well, if I lose, I lose, suck it up, move on to next week. And IRL can make us a little crabby at times, or whatever's happened. I know I've been a great dirty hypocrite and done this myself even recently, lol. I bitched at Siphai for Mass Hypnosis vs. Dreadnought back in FRR6. We got into a discussion, and things stayed the same. Didn't get me anywhere. Why should it, Kody? It's a perfectly viable loss you fucking retard, get over it.
It's also a kind of mental note for myself, because I'm prone to getting a little frustrated at times, and I realize I need to cool down.
As for stat systems, I'll be fully honest and say I really do like the changes Spatula implemented into RB, and am seriously considering using them for Ruination 3. However, there is one thing I wanted to discuss about that, as well. The multiple weapon rule thing. I actually very much dislike it, as I feel it ruins the chances for multiple-weapon bots to be really viable. I mean, IRL this is kind of understandable as the only multi-weapons bot I remember (off the top of my head) to ever really do well (in Battlebots anyway) was Tazbot, and he didn't even make the finals. Warrior SKF I can't say, because I haven't been able to follow him.
I feel there needs to be an adjustment to this rule. I understand why Spatula implemented it, because shit like Curse of the Deep is fucking overpowered as hell (though as the father of the idea of CotD2, I'll take the blame :P) as well as Airazor (sorry again .__.) and a few others, but it's just not working. Perhaps we should revert to the previous system, but have a weapon point cap for multiple weapons? That would discourage crazy shit.
And at the end of the day, it's just a forum game. Something we waste our lives on for absolutely no fundamental goal in life. So why really argue about it.
Okay I'm done. Hope you enjoyed this waffle.