ROBOTS 3 predictions

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Venice Queen
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ROBOTS 3 predictions

Post by Venice Queen » Sun Jun 23, 2019 12:14 pm

[insert usual disclaimer about this just being my opinion here. if you don't like it, prove me wrong and then laugh at me in 8 weeks]

italics indicate dark horses

Feathers: there’s an incredibly large amount of control verts in this division, and they’re all gonna get creamed by mudcrab (king of the control verts) and the strong spinners. I will be watching with a curious eye any matchups they have vs sixpounder and black salvo – they’re the good bricks in the division: if they lose, these verts might be up to something

1. Mudcrab: 9/12 still has a 12 armor front, still has a flipper level drivetrain, still punishes low armor – and all of that is before you have to contend with its wedge layers. Expect it to perform as well as before.
2. Kirby: Hses lose instantly here unless they have some sorta big ol meme config. Other options give the right margins as well, should perform well.
3. Idiot Triangle: 16/12. functional 16 weapon that spins up in a second and a half gives some interesting options.
4. Black dog 3: I really wanna see this vs mudcrab. Will have problems with PTS, Kirby, and idiot triangle 14/10
5. Sixpounder: both alex and laz are experimenting with this hellhound style bot with a no weapon config. Personally I’m not convinced – it’ll work well against horizontals, but not against strong verts – where neither this nor hellhound have clear plans, other than just… being fast. Which admittedly is a decent plan I guess :V
6. Black Salvo: the rare straight up wedge. Another one of dylan’s bots that shows clear inspiration from the insect weight metas he interacts with – and his own bot. no clear plan for dealing with bots with better wedges, which is why this is below sixpounder, even though it has WAY better anti-vert options.
7. PTS: lorge weapon. Will win where it should, which is a lot of places in this division 15/11
8. Terrible Toad Twins: vert clusters are gross for wedges, but their spinner matchups aren’t particularly generous, other than all of the other wedge verts that it will beat in entertaining fashion
9. Mekabu: 13/11 or 11/13/11. Again with the very low weapon wedge verts. This one has enough armor for me to at least entertain the thought of it winning spinner matchups
10. Beaned: momma bear^3. People are finally realizing that clusters are good. Well, good until they hit playoffs: you’re a 1 trick pony, and all your tools have to work together perfectly to succeed: by the time you hit playoffs, people have seen your trick 8 times, and know how to manage it. Clamp is also a classic maxi will kill itself over time bot
11. HardWired: wep: 12/11/9. Very good anti-wedge design. Not so good at dealing with spinners.
12. OwO: 12/11/9 the invertibility claim is… questionable. much like hardwired this has a very low weapon value, but it doesn’t have the wedge versatility to win those wedge matches as easily
13. What’s the scoop: lmao this is gonna win some matches
14. Antbar and Sawndisc: Sawndisc desperately needs more reach but it’s almost very clever. The cluster as a whole struggles to synergize with itself, and will really only beat low armor/armor stacking slowish bots. And me. This bot is gonna fuck me up :V
15. FGiT: 13/10 well I fucked up the anti wedge config something fierce, but this might still work sometimes… maybe. I meet some spinners on the weapon: weapon armor ratios :V
16. Entropic Degeneration: bootleg Crabcore: lacks a wedge on the claws, and will be resting on them (the wheels are below the horizontal plan, as notable in the side-on picture, which will put it at an angle that lifts the forks off the ground but leaves the claws on the ground, unless they are very open). Can get some meme one shots off on non-spinners, tho.

Lightweights: weird shit happened here. There’s a duo of apex designs with a proven philosophy, and then we immediately get Alex with a dumbass melty, me with a dumbass speed wedge, ys with a fucking side hammer, and tri with an ever dumbassier speed wedge flipper thing. And then wolf with a memey amount of pressing wedges, Jules with a bot that is desperately trying to kill itself with its own ramming damage, and fucking Ilwoon. It’s like we all took magic mushrooms before entering our lightweights. So yeah. Fuck if I know what’s gonna happen.
1. Hallucinogen: literally Nuclear Plague. I think it wins the 1v1 so it gets to be 1 point higher
2. Nuclear Plague: 14/11 or 12/13/11 well statted spinner in a wedgefight oriented division. Should have a good time.
3. Madscience: 16/13 this is peak monsterworks. Wedge heavy division, advantages this well, potentially.
4. Venice Queen: …I think I actually have too much armor. Somehow.
5. <3: it’s a wonky hammer, but it’s still a hammer, so it’ll still struggle with spinners but do well against control oriented designs. There’s a lot of control oriented designs
6. Dubior Jr: this shape of bot worries me when it comes to wedge effectiveness. Obviously this insta loses to the 5 or so spinners around, but it does have the stats to hilariously clownstomp… most of the other bots around, which is pretty good dark horse for champ depending on who it can avoid
7. Storm worm: this still has way too many moving parts – you’ll never use all of them – and that gives it a really suspect armor total. You don’t have the 10 speed VQ does, really don’t trust you being able to get away with 10 armor. Also a bit worried about the speed relative to other wedges, though overall this is still a brick with good wedge options, which is why it’s up here :P.
8. Circuitz: Dubior/venice queen on steroids. Is likely to hurt itself ramming though. This division is fuckin weird man.
9. Pneumatix: notable advantage over standard britflippers: this has a good wedge. Will have problems when wedged though.
10. Star Spangled: another flipper heavily reliant on OOTAs with no way to get there consistently. At least this one has armor
11. Ilwoon: well this doesn’t have …terrible matches. There’s a complete lack of plan for spinners in stats (wonky rockey strats aside), its reach is terrible: but it has a lot of weapon and a decent wedge, and this is rocket.
12. YV: 5 weapon on a design that can’t actually lift is iffy. 9 frontal armor is REAL iffy. In a division with a lot of wedges, you really needed more speed and less weapon if you wanted to try a design like this, especially since you can’t effectively press and move with kiwi drive
13. Flipcake: bog standard lifter without that many wedge options. Too many flippers for this to have a good time. I’d say it would still do well (because I think it can in a vacuum), but at this point tbr you’re gonna have to convince me that you can resist the urge to flank other control bots – there’s a LOT of robots faster than you in this division. If you do, you’ll do much better than you are placed, hence the dark horse
14. Hard news: 14/11 . theoretically wins-matches about half of its spinner matchups, and does have a srimech, but man I’m just not gonna trust this style of bot until it works
15. Admiral: hey look a britflipper. All in on OOTAs with the weapon, but doesn’t have the torque to get enemies there consistently. Armor is decent, but bonused area is a bit thin and could pose problems. Frog seems to run into this problem a lot, actually – when he’s not making some sorta completely wacky-ass design, he doesn’t always stat successfully.
16. OverCutter: 15/11 lmao there’s so many flippers here dude biiig oof. Does theoretically beat Hallucinogenic plague on weapon:armor ratios tho

Middleweight: this has like 4 verts that I completely don’t trust to work as well as they need to. Ya ever just want to dark horse an entire division :V
1. Hati: this has great armor and speed, this division has a lot of spinners that are useless without their weapons and likely to end up losing them. Ranks above visual assault based on division placement: this fucker got all the spinners :P
2. Visual Assault: original plan was low weapon high torque yeets, but people decided to enter enough spinners that I had to go for low speed high torque lots of weapon. Honestly this is a better statline, so I’m glad this happened.
3. NKC: ya know the fact that there’s one last minute saw but like, 3 last minute melties makes me worry about the melty rules being too good :V . solid design, good stats: classic Badnik
4. Epicer Waluigi: 16/12 I can appreciate completely disregarding control, though there are enough spinners that it is going to worry me a bit. This does theoretically beat every spinner weapon on weapon tho, and Noah tends to know what he’s doing.
5. Whirlpool: 15/11 I’m quite unconvinced by side spinners still, I just don’t think it’s an efficient shape for delivering hits. That being said at least you don’t kill yourself :V
6. White Cat: 16/10 this is lowish for the same reason abyss is. You don’t have the drivetrain to get away with weakening your weapon. I get the idea, but I honestly would have gone a point lower on the armor to have torque for the push wars with wedges.
7. Abyss: 16/11 black dog style, without the black dog stats. it relies heavily on its weapon for its defense and offense, and it damages its weapon over the course of the match. I do not trust going all in on a glass cannon, though it’ll probably only come back to bite you in like, semis and maybe one groups match.
8. Dragonfist: 16/11 another spinner that endangers itself and has no backup option
9. Lethal target: 15/11 loses weapon to weapon a lot, but it doesn’t damage its weapon so that’s nice
10. Di-Trouble Gen: 15/11 ya know its stats are wildly different than Epicer Waluigi but honestly it wins and loses to the same opponents if epicer waluigi does as poorly as it could possibly do.
11. Uptown Funk: bit low on armor, but I like the tradeoffs you’re making for it here. Will still struggle a bit for it though.
12. Pressure Flop: there’s a lot of overkill here. It mostly comes down to how open people are to writing you one shot shit – also, it’s notable that turrets are not as good under this ruleset than they are under the CBC one, though I forget the exact differences :V

13. Don’t Strangle The Martian Horses: hammer is mounted too low and far forewards to effectively hit a lot of bots: it’s not worthwhile to trade that for invertibility on an archetype that already self rights efficiently.
14. Der Adder: 11/13 ok this is going too low on weapon power
15. Hurricane Flip: poor wheel placement on a design entirely committed to getting its flipper under things
16. Electron: 13/12 isn’t great in the spinner matchups especially with that shape. It’s a shame, really. This has an interesting stat spread that is archtypical rookie shit: almost meta, but with some wonky twist. In a wedgier division it would get a few wins for it, but there’s too many spinners that will punish this for not having a decent weapon.

Heavyweights: people took this division seriously but didn’t enter any verts other than Mul-T, so this division is straight outta 2015 ARC. Don’t feel bad about a low rank: you’re just slightly less good, really :V
1. Hellhound: Laz did the usual laz brag about hellhound working well in this division, because he was correct. The best wonker wedges (that would classically counter hellhound) are 4-bars so he doesn’t really lose to them on matchup
2. Mult-T: 13/13 puts it equal with everything but Blackburn Kangaroo, and the hammer is gross for wedge matches with how far underneath it can reach. I worry about it taking on undercutters though – he has to declare, so he can’t try and meme them with the hammer.
3. Blackburn Kangaroo: 16/11 OR 14/15 . I comprehensively win every spinner v spinner matchup on stats (and my disc gives me more mass on the outside of the spinner than my opponent’s bars, +it’s harder for a wedge to prevent a disc from spinning up compared to a bar), and I have decent options for wedges, where it matters less that I’m damaging myself.
4. Tabor: tabor functionally acts the same as the clampbots I used to enter all the time – the 7 (5/5) weapon split is REALLY good if you can make it work, and Rocket’s figured out how to make a turret lifter work. Its margins are good too: 14 armor makes up for 6 speed in the spinner fights. Can it beat other wedges consistently though?
5. Ten transformations tanuki: I really woulda gone for a +1 armor bonus, but I think it’s more personal preference.
6. Night Jackal: 16/11 more of an anti-wedge design, which gives it good advantage in those matchups, but I really worry for it vs death metal. Hurts itself
7. Death Metal: 16/11 just the anti-wedge bar? Ranks higher in the spinner vs spinner fight because it’s a midcutter, but having a setup with mass further out to the edges would have really helped. Hurts itself.
8. Omnicrap: plow has… iffy coverage. Enough of the spinners have good enough reach to punish this, but it’ll do quite well on other matchups
9. Apocalyptic peacekeeper: is it capable of self righting and OOTAing in the armor config? Overall solid, though it gives up a bit too much in the wedge fights to be able to lift properly
10. Blue Zenith: 16/11 not the beefiest looking weapon, which makes me worry about its matchup versus the undercutters and its reach versus wedges. Hurts itself.
11. Shadow: 13/12 means it slowly loses spinner fights on pure stats, but it actually has the drivetrain to compensate for that if Code can rp decently. Expect a surprise OOTA or two, as well
12. Sideswipe: well it has the fuck you armor, but it really doesn’t have the best in terms of speed. It has the options and stats available to it to win, but I’m not necessarily confident in it.

13. Defenestrator: yeahhhh that anti spinner config with this field?
14. Saturnian Wristwatch: 15/11 loses to too many opposing spinners
15. Doomerang: 13/11 Or 15/11 means it loses every matchup it needs to win
16. V2: 13/12/10 there’s an argument here for this sort of design – its something that works a little bit worse on ARC because of how armor bonuses work (I’ve wondered about the intelligence of letting spinners apply their weapon armor bonus to whatever part of the robot they want to let this sort of design be more viable – think it’s a bit too strong tho) – but if you get just enough armor on the wedge, you disperse the enemy spinner’s damage with the wedge enough that your underpowered and potentially underarmored spinner beats theirs significantly weapon to weapon. If it did work, it would be in a division where not every spinner is at the power cap – 10 armor is just not quite enough: I want to see this work though, and I feel like it does have the tiniest chance of

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