Author Topic: Non GTM RA2 Thread  (Read 4675 times)

Offline Billy5545

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Non GTM RA2 Thread
« on: May 14, 2019, 09:40:05 AM »
So, after seeing some non GTM RA2 stuffs, I decided to make a thread for things related to them, to show the rest of GTM those, as I noticed that most of the stuffs found outside of GTM are posted or linked on Discord, and there's some people who don't use it.

So first, for tourneys, there's Robotic World League by Alloftheman. RWL 2 will happen somewhere this month or next month. In addition, it will release eps when signup for RWL 2 happens. It has an intro now though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KFg5E48oUo&feature=youtu.be

Second tourney is Robottal Wars, by the Good Robottal people, who mainly operate on Youtube and Discord. Their YouTube channel if you want to watch it: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC9w0YrifKOGJhzC7cM8lIFg

And third, in the Unofficial Robot Arena 2 Facebook group, there's a Chinese RA2 AI tourney now. It doesn't have a standardized standard right now though. Pics of it and the splashes, as well as link (for link, you have to be a member of the group to see it though)
 
Screenshot_2019-05-14-09-34-31.png

 
FB_IMG_1557798175962.jpg

 
FB_IMG_1557798160335.jpg

 
FB_IMG_1557798183101.jpg

 
FB_IMG_1557798149742.jpg

https://www.facebook.com/groups/UnofficialRA2/permalink/926507061074266/

Offline SagarisRA2

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2019, 10:04:23 AM »
Damn they like their typhoon teeth more than we do

Offline Hoppin

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #2 on: May 14, 2019, 11:59:42 AM »
Damn they like their typhoon teeth more than we do

In fairness I think they've seen our stuff and gone nuts with it.

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Offline pokebro14

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #3 on: May 14, 2019, 02:43:08 PM »
Tbh some of this stuff is better than the bots some people here make.
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Offline Dreamcast

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #4 on: May 15, 2019, 12:13:51 AM »
I wonder why they use so many small wedges. It's a good look but I'm not sure how it is helping from a combat standpoint.

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #5 on: May 15, 2019, 01:13:22 AM »
This makes me pretty happy. Nice to know people still find this game.

Offline Merrick

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #6 on: May 15, 2019, 08:29:44 AM »
I wonder why they use so many small wedges. It's a good look but I'm not sure how it is helping from a combat standpoint.

Each community has their own meta, I suppose.

There's a few really good looking bots on these splashes though. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Offline Billy5545

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #7 on: May 15, 2019, 08:45:52 AM »
Anyway, decided to show another non GTM RA2 tourney. There's Roboforce by Tigerex. It is a Stock tourney featuring his own bots on first main series, and the next main series will be Stock IRL too. However, Roboforce will do an Extreme series first, which is on signup now and is DSL IRL, and signup will end on June. Entry limit is basically unlimited, though be warned some of the entries may eventually be turned down. The channel if you want to watch Roboforce btw: https://m.youtube.com/user/tigerex5

Meanwhile, for my opinion on the Chinese tourney, will be a good idea if they like allow other players not from their community to participate too tbh. Maybe like a China vs The World tourney

Offline MoonSet416

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #8 on: May 15, 2019, 09:14:58 AM »
Hey guys MoonSet416 (Michael Wang on FB) here.

First, our tournament does have a ruleset (although far from finalized and we are constantly tweaking it). But sorry for now I just cbb to translate it to English.

About the small wedges: they are LOW to the ground when you use them correctly. This ties into the next section as well since it plays a huge role in our meta.

The Chinese tournament runs a very very modified version of the game where spinners rule like they do in the real world (and we have a sportsman division for other bots). Here's an observation I made: since the game tournament is held quite often and there's no cost associated with rebuilding from scratch (aside from time), the robot designs evolve faster in game than in the real world <insert SAO S3 reference here>.

Our first tournament saw robots that are only tested against the game's original AI bots, and still struggled to defeat things like Shogun and got outwedged by things like Critical Emergency. Most of our robots at the time were somewhat similar to the early RW bots, with a pretty wide variety of weapons and build quality. One of the bots called Hyper Force (based on Bite Force), however, was probably the first to use hinged small wedges in China and achieved great result by basically outwedging everyone else. Paired with its vertical spinner HF did quite well.

After the success of HF, a number of similar 4WD verticals with hinged front wedges appeared in the second tournament. At the same time a type of robot was also developed in direct response to these HF lookalikes. NKVD was a huge vertical spinner with no wedges (much like Deep Six) and was able to win a head on collision with an HF style robot by basically only contacting the opponent's weapon and having higher tip speed and bite due to its larger diameter. NKVD did have issues fighting horizontals and did not do very well, but its concept lived on. Also, robots with different configurations also emerged, some taking inspiration from Bite Force's multiple wedges (see a trend here? we really like BF for some reason... maybe it's because it won?) while some other went the path of Bombshell (S2) with completely different weapons for each configuration.

I personally think that the third season was very interesting. On the one hand you see the number of non-spinners plummet (they went to the sportsman comp), on the other hand you see a diversification inside the spinner category. You still have your old HF style 4WD spinners, but large diameter verticals definitely took over, within which there are 4WD variants, 2WD variants, and even some that change to a smaller weapon and thick wedge when fighting horizontals. The winner was surprisingly a swiss army bot with a vertical spinner mode for normal use and a flipper mode tailored to large verticals. Turns out that if you stick a sloped surface under large verticals they knock themselves out.

And that's just the weapon side of things. With the prevalence of vertical spinners, the fight for lower ground clearance was quite fierce. The formula that we have currently agreed on is hinge + some rod + small wedge. Sounds simple, but the intricacies of how to outwedge another robot with the same style of wedges is beyond me. We have seen situations where A outwedges B, B outwedges C and then C outwedges A. There is definitely a lot to be learnt here.

We are also constantly tweaking the "game balance". Two major "patches" were made to largely unify the power to weight ratio of motors and the HP to weight ratio of armor panels. More changes to come.

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #9 on: May 15, 2019, 09:33:43 AM »
I am extremely interested in what is to come for this, will this series of tournaments ever be going to GTM or will people from GTM be able to join in the future?
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Offline MoonSet416

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #10 on: May 15, 2019, 10:02:33 AM »
TBH I don't know at this point. We are currently in the middle of our fourth tournament and we are finalizing the game for the fifth. Once we feel like the new version is ready we will probably post it here. It would be really nice to see new comps under similar rulesets and game version though, as our version does yield significantly different results.

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #11 on: May 15, 2019, 11:15:34 AM »
Hey guys MoonSet416 (Michael Wang on FB) here.

First, our tournament does have a ruleset (although far from finalized and we are constantly tweaking it). But sorry for now I just cbb to translate it to English.

About the small wedges: they are LOW to the ground when you use them correctly. This ties into the next section as well since it plays a huge role in our meta.

The Chinese tournament runs a very very modified version of the game where spinners rule like they do in the real world (and we have a sportsman division for other bots). Here's an observation I made: since the game tournament is held quite often and there's no cost associated with rebuilding from scratch (aside from time), the robot designs evolve faster in game than in the real world <insert SAO S3 reference here>.

Our first tournament saw robots that are only tested against the game's original AI bots, and still struggled to defeat things like Shogun and got outwedged by things like Critical Emergency. Most of our robots at the time were somewhat similar to the early RW bots, with a pretty wide variety of weapons and build quality. One of the bots called Hyper Force (based on Bite Force), however, was probably the first to use hinged small wedges in China and achieved great result by basically outwedging everyone else. Paired with its vertical spinner HF did quite well.

After the success of HF, a number of similar 4WD verticals with hinged front wedges appeared in the second tournament. At the same time a type of robot was also developed in direct response to these HF lookalikes. NKVD was a huge vertical spinner with no wedges (much like Deep Six) and was able to win a head on collision with an HF style robot by basically only contacting the opponent's weapon and having higher tip speed and bite due to its larger diameter. NKVD did have issues fighting horizontals and did not do very well, but its concept lived on. Also, robots with different configurations also emerged, some taking inspiration from Bite Force's multiple wedges (see a trend here? we really like BF for some reason... maybe it's because it won?) while some other went the path of Bombshell (S2) with completely different weapons for each configuration.

I personally think that the third season was very interesting. On the one hand you see the number of non-spinners plummet (they went to the sportsman comp), on the other hand you see a diversification inside the spinner category. You still have your old HF style 4WD spinners, but large diameter verticals definitely took over, within which there are 4WD variants, 2WD variants, and even some that change to a smaller weapon and thick wedge when fighting horizontals. The winner was surprisingly a swiss army bot with a vertical spinner mode for normal use and a flipper mode tailored to large verticals. Turns out that if you stick a sloped surface under large verticals they knock themselves out.

And that's just the weapon side of things. With the prevalence of vertical spinners, the fight for lower ground clearance was quite fierce. The formula that we have currently agreed on is hinge + some rod + small wedge. Sounds simple, but the intricacies of how to outwedge another robot with the same style of wedges is beyond me. We have seen situations where A outwedges B, B outwedges C and then C outwedges A. There is definitely a lot to be learnt here.

We are also constantly tweaking the "game balance". Two major "patches" were made to largely unify the power to weight ratio of motors and the HP to weight ratio of armor panels. More changes to come.

First of all on a serious note it's lovely to see how your meta and game has evolved without much if any input from us on the forum. It's an interesting observation and would love to read over your current ruleset!

A member here, GuldenFlame, ran a tournament in a similar fashion to your game type with our more strict ruleset, it's still going on I think but you can watch it here "Everything is too OP". I think if you're looking to standardize the rules, that's a good place to look, but I'd like to see the community come up with the solutions for them independently tbh.

Finally in regards to the videos and their quality. There's a few things the host can do. Firstly, install the wide screen fix for DSL, which is linked here "Wide Screen Fix for DSL" then set your resolution to your monitor using the ra2.cfg file in the base folder. This should remove the black bars on the side and wont have any stretching issues. Secondly, in the options of the game, you can disable status messages which are the status of each robot, it's entirely optional and dependent on what people prefer.

Where can we learn more about the tournament, seeing more videos for it, etc?

Thank you for updating and sharing this, hope you continue to do so.
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Offline Dreamcast

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #12 on: May 15, 2019, 11:34:15 AM »
About the small wedges: they are LOW to the ground when you use them correctly. This ties into the next section as well since it plays a huge role in our meta.

Okay, DSL 2.1 had wedges like that, but it was generally a door/skirt hinge+skirt, which is less useful now with the thicker skirts. Both methods apply useful amounts of pressure to the ground.

The formula that we have currently agreed on is hinge + some rod + small wedge. Sounds simple, but the intricacies of how to outwedge another robot with the same style of wedges is beyond me. We have seen situations where A outwedges B, B outwedges C and then C outwedges A. There is definitely a lot to be learnt here.

Wedges are tricky. For example, some robots have wedges flush with each other. This is creating a small weakness. Wedge quality decreases as you move away from the center of the hinge.
Perhaps they are trying to make a platform for the opponent to sit on, but there are better ways of doing that. There are other factors too, such as pressure, weight distribution, and sometimes floor meshes.

Offline Billy5545

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #13 on: May 15, 2019, 11:38:34 AM »
About the small wedges: they are LOW to the ground when you use them correctly. This ties into the next section as well since it plays a huge role in our meta.

Okay, DSL 2.1 had wedges like that, but it was generally a door/skirt hinge+skirt, which is less useful now with the thicker skirts. Both methods apply useful amounts of pressure to the ground.

The formula that we have currently agreed on is hinge + some rod + small wedge. Sounds simple, but the intricacies of how to outwedge another robot with the same style of wedges is beyond me. We have seen situations where A outwedges B, B outwedges C and then C outwedges A. There is definitely a lot to be learnt here.

Wedges are tricky. For example, some robots have wedges flush with each other. This is creating a small weakness. Wedge quality decreases as you move away from the center of the hinge.
Perhaps they are trying to make a platform for the opponent to sit on, but there are better ways of doing that. There are other factors too, such as pressure, weight distribution, and sometimes floor meshes.
To add to the wedge mechanic talk, heard before that it's basically 30% mechanics and 70% luck. For mechanics, from what I heard is that basically hinged wedge plus a balanced speed so the bot is not too slow and have enough speed to wedge and push stuff up, while not frontflipping badly on first contact

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #14 on: May 15, 2019, 04:44:42 PM »
China Vs GTM HYPE

Offline Billy5545

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #15 on: May 15, 2019, 06:01:08 PM »
So, RWL finally release episodes. The first 8 are released, with the 9 being worked on. Signup for RWL 2 is still not open yet though. The link to the eps: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLZ_PAJtWdXCwZlaFMsQjMLq2q6cz6Ukj

Offline MoonSet416

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #16 on: May 15, 2019, 07:27:43 PM »
Hey guys MoonSet416 (Michael Wang on FB) here.

First, our tournament does have a ruleset (although far from finalized and we are constantly tweaking it). But sorry for now I just cbb to translate it to English.

About the small wedges: they are LOW to the ground when you use them correctly. This ties into the next section as well since it plays a huge role in our meta.

The Chinese tournament runs a very very modified version of the game where spinners rule like they do in the real world (and we have a sportsman division for other bots). Here's an observation I made: since the game tournament is held quite often and there's no cost associated with rebuilding from scratch (aside from time), the robot designs evolve faster in game than in the real world <insert SAO S3 reference here>.

Our first tournament saw robots that are only tested against the game's original AI bots, and still struggled to defeat things like Shogun and got outwedged by things like Critical Emergency. Most of our robots at the time were somewhat similar to the early RW bots, with a pretty wide variety of weapons and build quality. One of the bots called Hyper Force (based on Bite Force), however, was probably the first to use hinged small wedges in China and achieved great result by basically outwedging everyone else. Paired with its vertical spinner HF did quite well.

After the success of HF, a number of similar 4WD verticals with hinged front wedges appeared in the second tournament. At the same time a type of robot was also developed in direct response to these HF lookalikes. NKVD was a huge vertical spinner with no wedges (much like Deep Six) and was able to win a head on collision with an HF style robot by basically only contacting the opponent's weapon and having higher tip speed and bite due to its larger diameter. NKVD did have issues fighting horizontals and did not do very well, but its concept lived on. Also, robots with different configurations also emerged, some taking inspiration from Bite Force's multiple wedges (see a trend here? we really like BF for some reason... maybe it's because it won?) while some other went the path of Bombshell (S2) with completely different weapons for each configuration.

I personally think that the third season was very interesting. On the one hand you see the number of non-spinners plummet (they went to the sportsman comp), on the other hand you see a diversification inside the spinner category. You still have your old HF style 4WD spinners, but large diameter verticals definitely took over, within which there are 4WD variants, 2WD variants, and even some that change to a smaller weapon and thick wedge when fighting horizontals. The winner was surprisingly a swiss army bot with a vertical spinner mode for normal use and a flipper mode tailored to large verticals. Turns out that if you stick a sloped surface under large verticals they knock themselves out.

And that's just the weapon side of things. With the prevalence of vertical spinners, the fight for lower ground clearance was quite fierce. The formula that we have currently agreed on is hinge + some rod + small wedge. Sounds simple, but the intricacies of how to outwedge another robot with the same style of wedges is beyond me. We have seen situations where A outwedges B, B outwedges C and then C outwedges A. There is definitely a lot to be learnt here.

We are also constantly tweaking the "game balance". Two major "patches" were made to largely unify the power to weight ratio of motors and the HP to weight ratio of armor panels. More changes to come.

First of all on a serious note it's lovely to see how your meta and game has evolved without much if any input from us on the forum. It's an interesting observation and would love to read over your current ruleset!

A member here, GuldenFlame, ran a tournament in a similar fashion to your game type with our more strict ruleset, it's still going on I think but you can watch it here "Everything is too OP". I think if you're looking to standardize the rules, that's a good place to look, but I'd like to see the community come up with the solutions for them independently tbh.

Finally in regards to the videos and their quality. There's a few things the host can do. Firstly, install the wide screen fix for DSL, which is linked here "Wide Screen Fix for DSL" then set your resolution to your monitor using the ra2.cfg file in the base folder. This should remove the black bars on the side and wont have any stretching issues. Secondly, in the options of the game, you can disable status messages which are the status of each robot, it's entirely optional and dependent on what people prefer.

Where can we learn more about the tournament, seeing more videos for it, etc?

Thank you for updating and sharing this, hope you continue to do so.

Nice to see there's a solution to the video quality problem, I will let the host know.

About the comp itself, we are currently working on finalizing our version of the game and once we are finished, will probably upload the game. It should include AI bots of the first three tournaments so that you can see for yourself. There may be more vids uploaded to FB but not sure atm.

Offline Mystic2000

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #17 on: May 16, 2019, 01:04:38 PM »
that'd be great, a couple things i was wondering looking at the chinese meta evolution you described:

1. how are horizontal spinners doing in this meta ? are tombclones more common or are overheads the majority ?
2. did anyone tried the HUGE style of design yet over in china ? seems like it'd be a even more potent counter to the small, Bite Force like verts, althought i imagine the increase in bigger diameter verticals would be very troublesome for them
3. you mentioned series 3 winner was a swiss-army with a flipper setup, are there others non-spinners that still go far despite the very spinner-heavy environment ?
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Offline Jonzu95

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #18 on: May 16, 2019, 07:14:20 PM »
Not going to lie, it feels strange to see Quality RA2 content outside of GTM.

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Re: Non GTM RA2 Thread
« Reply #19 on: May 16, 2019, 11:11:12 PM »
that'd be great, a couple things i was wondering looking at the chinese meta evolution you described:

1. how are horizontal spinners doing in this meta ? are tombclones more common or are overheads the majority ?
2. did anyone tried the HUGE style of design yet over in china ? seems like it'd be a even more potent counter to the small, Bite Force like verts, althought i imagine the increase in bigger diameter verticals would be very troublesome for them
3. you mentioned series 3 winner was a swiss-army with a flipper setup, are there others non-spinners that still go far despite the very spinner-heavy environment ?

Horizontals are doing quite well for themselves, I haven't mentioned them previously because I personally only build verticals and am not familiar with them. For whatever reason tombclones are CRAP in this game, as confirmed by multiple horizontal builders in our community. Usually you see overheads or FBS. The fourth heavyweight champion is actually an FBS.

Yeah there was one HUGE style bot entered into the fourth tournament. Last time I saw it it was more like HU    GE after a fight against a vertical (reminds you of something?). Seriously though yeah large diameter verticals pretty much makes HUGE style verticals obsolete.

Our first champion was actually a flipper. In the later tournaments tho most non-spinners usually just go to the sportsman class. Wedges/flippers have seen somewhat of a resurgence as they are great counters to large verts.