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« on: December 21, 2019, 11:30:26 PM »
Some more thoughts regarding damage, chassis hitpoints, and breaking apart components with reference to my previous post about disintegrating robots:
-Currently, the game mechanics are similar to Robot Arena 2, where players design a chassis that is most like a solid body onto which components are attached.
-In real life combat robot design, the chassis is not a solid block, but panels and components attached to a frame or unibody construction of some sort, covering other panels, components, and mounts for those components. During combat, these panels and components are deformed and/or forcibly removed from the frame (also known as damage to the robot).
-The creative freedom currently allowed in Robot Rumble 2 allows for robots to be built out of custom parts much like they are in real life. The only weird part about this is the base "chassis", which seems to have the robot's hit points for judging a KO.
As an experiment, I created a sort of egg beater-style vertical spinner robot that actually has a base chassis that makes up for a small part of the center of the robot. The rest of the robot is composed of re-scaled shapes that are formed into body panels that cover the front, sides, and rear. These are attached to base body panels which are themselves attached to the small chassis piece.
While this method of construction is time-consuming and pretty KO-proof compared to what we're used to experiencing in RA2, I find the combat this creates a lot more satisfying. For an example, I pitted my Tombstonesque horizontal bar-spinning robot against my beater-spinning robot created in this way and the destruction is just awesome! I easily pick apart the wheels, the frame surrounding the spinner, then whoops the spinner breaks off! Then repeated hits to the top and rear body panels just send them flying away, exposing the poor robots guts!
Am I the only one who's going to be building robots in this way from now on? Because it's just fun being able to tear these things apart piece by piece!
One thing I don't quite understand is how the damage is working. How does the material thickness slider affect the damage a panel or weapon takes? What about the physical size of the panel or weapon, or its material? I know the system is totally a WIP, though.
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I'm glad I'm not the only one who's thinking about bot building like this! I'm going to redo all my bots in this fashion. I just wish the "house" bots were built like this. I just like metal carnage (metalnage?).