(I wrote this right after we finished filming CENTAURI 3 while it was still fresh in my mind but didn't post it till now to avoid spoiling the matches)
TCRR: I might riff on this bot a bit but I mean no ill will. I really am glad you entered and I honestly learned a lot from the experience.
okay, so Code Red has kind of blown my mind. I like to think i know a thing or two about ra2 but I didn't see this coming at all.
So I just finished hosting CENTAURI 3, an 8-player pvp tournament using parsec. Code was one of the players that entered, with this...
unique design... and, with all due respect, I actually was really close to rejecting it initially because I thought the build was too sloppy. It fishtails and is hard to drive, it's not invertible, has tinfoil armor, and the weapon looks like a joke. my thoughts were it was going to guaranteed die and eat up a slot that a more polished design could fill. especially because the last tournament of mine he entered a bot that was... well.
special.But boy was I wrong and I'm so glad I was. As I talked about
in my topic about how pvp will save RA2, I predicted pvp would bring about the rise of a whole new meta and era of innovation if people just gave it a chance. In any AI tournament, this robot would lose 2-0 in both of its matches and be immediately removed from the competition. MS2 got a very neck-and-neck runner-up to a very solid wedgy VS. It
consistently won matches, and against bots I thought would trounce it (including mine
).
There's a couple reasons why I think it did so well and why I think it matters:
We were all building like we would for an AI tournament. status quo stuff. 2wd wedgy VS, damaging weapons, etc. All of our weapons were front-facing and most of our bots had minimal side protection. You don't need much side protection in AI and most of us just thoughtlessly built around that mindset out of habit. MS2 hard countered a lot of our designs by eating wheels and motors left and right. Call us shortsighted for not putting wheelguards on but that's exactly my point - you have to build differently for pvp and I think that's a very good thing.
There was no way to see it coming. with an AI you can pretty easily predict what the fight is going to be like most of the time, but due to having a human driver, the bot was able to adapt as the fights went along. Code would change up his approach when something didn't work and most of the time it was effective. He'd switch from the plow to the spinner constantly. He didn't overly rely on one over the other, he would swap between pushing into hazards and going on the offense with his spinner and it worked very well.
Also: this. goofy. weapon. my goodness this thing. I swear it ripped some vital component off of every single competitor consistently every round of every fight. In my experience I thought both DSL bars and iron spikes on spinners were subpar. I never build weapons like this. But something about the position of these weapons allowed it to amputate some important part of his opponent like every round. It's kind of amazing and I personally want to look at it more. Without a human at the controls I feel it would do much worse, but that is hardly a negative.
Driving matters. Code is a much better driver than I thought he would be, especially considering how hard MS2 is to drive (its wicked hard). I feel this design would not work if you drive poorly. AI has no such concept.
In all, this isn't your everyday Razor Guy or Insult to Injury V - bots that were pretty bad but had a huge streak of wins or luck - MS2 is a different beast. In a lot of ways it's ahead of the curve. It
looks subpar but it's innovative and very solid. Stuff like this is why I feel I can't go back to AI tournaments. you never see upsets like this in AI, at most you feel like it's a fluke. MS2 was no fluke. It may not have set the bot building world ablaze but I think it's a glimpse of how the pvp meta will evolve and that always makes me happy to see. I have never been so happy to lose a match in my life.
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