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Despite the fact that there were only 15 entries (including sniper), I was very pleased with the competition. I watched a few of the battles (usually about 5 matches from each pairing), and saw that many of the robots were quite fascinating! I was pleased to see that many of the robots used varying tactics, and varying scan arcs to quickly find an enemy and then narrow it down and lock on. The robots that seemed to do the best were the ones that kept moving, and made frequent turns to avoid being hit. The ones that got stuck on the wall, or stopped for any length of time tended to die quickly. In a way, this first competition was quite a challenge since no one knew what they would be up against, and there were very few quality robots available to test against. At this point I now invite others to start their own competitions (I will release the first non-beta version of the game soon). One interesting tactic that a few robots used was to fire several shots at slightly different angles to increase the chances of hitting. "The Noid" did this quite effectively. It's salvos were not unlike fish-nets being cast forth. Another interesting tactic was one that was used by Barabbas. What this robot did is to do the standard shoot-while-evading thing, but when it's target stopped moving or slowed down, this robot would fire a long hard blast of overburn missiles. Sometimes they would only clip the target, but if hit head on it was instant death. Seeker used a back-and-forth motion in an attempt to optimize it's distance from the target. Jynx was a wall-monger, slowly moving back and forth along a chosen wall. It would take a long time to lock onto a target, but once that happened this little guy would launch a nasty barrage of missiles. During the battles I saw a few interesting things too. There were several interesting "simultaneous death" situations. In one of them, the two robots were both scanning the wrong way, both only had a few percent of their armor left, and they then crashed into each other. Then they spotted each other at the same time, and both died. I also saw two robots drive side-by-side from one side of the arena to the other, hitting each other the whole way. In one battle, C-Lunk had been reduced to 1% armor. After a few moments of neither robot getting shot, this one ran into the wall and died. When 1Blood1 and Urmine fought, it reminded me of an aircraft dogfight, since both used constant-speed circular motions. Some of these battles would take some time since they would occasionally end up in patterns where neither would see each other. As far as I could tell, the time-limit was never reached in any battle. All of the ties were simultaneous deaths. All in all, most of the robots did quite well. I was rather impressed. It's been a lot of fun, and I thank all of those of you who participated. I look forward to doing it again. Unfortunately, it looks as though there might be a bug that influenced the outcome a little (look at Barabbas vs Sniper, Barabbas should have swept the floor with sniper), but without determining the results altogether. I ran a test with these two, and sure enough, sniper wins consistently when graphics are turned off, and Barabbas wins consistently with graphics on. For some reason, when graphics are turned off, barabbas rarely fires a shot. This should not be possible since having graphics on or off only makes the difference of whether anything gets drawn to the screen or not. I'll investigate further, but these results will stand. For this reason I decided to run a second set using all of the same robots, this time with graphics on. The results can be seen by clicking here. |