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I got into a deep dive of old seasons on YT during lockdown in 2020. This will be my first season following while it's on air. My newbie impression from all that I saw was that Minotaur and its driver loving rule, and I hope they win it all someday. I would say Tombstone because  that bot is lethal and its driver seems like a fun dude, but that thing has won like a bazillion times.
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Dec 3, 2021 13:58
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:47 |
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PostNouveau posted:Chomp will return next season a completely autonomous killing machine with chainsaws for hands and a hundred legs and it will go 0-4 and lose to Rusty  Rusty's single (?) win was one of the most exciting things I saw. I mean, it sucked, but I just wanted to see the thing win somehow. How can you not root for that janky lil' guy?
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Dec 3, 2021 14:03
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:Well speaking of Rusty, he's been upgraded a bit... And for some bounty hunter spoilers Rusty did also beat Kraken by a judge decision and almost gave Copperhead a heart attack in their fight... I saw those too. BTW, what is the difference between Bounty Hunters and the main show? All of the matches I watched on YT were just the matches, divorced of context. Was it a play-in to fight against the reigning champ or something, just as an excuse to have more bot fights? It looks like Rusty 2.0 is like a smaller Chomp? That hammer arm doesn't look like it has the power or reach to do much damage. I might end up missing the drill, as much of a hail Mary as it was. It was just so unique, and kind of thrilling if Rusty actually got a hold of a bot. This revision just seems to be a worse version of what already doesn't work well for most other bots who use it.
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Dec 3, 2021 14:43
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Thanks for the info!
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Dec 3, 2021 15:21
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RBA Starblade posted:I want Minotaur to go all the way this year  PostNouveau posted:Minotaur has been lurking on the edge for so long. Also I'm rooting for Minotaur most, but Witch Doctor is one of the many other bots I would be happy to see win the whole thing. They have certainly earned it.The sound of Minotaur's drum spooling up is frightening. That, Uppercut's weapon at peak performance, and Tombstone's....well, all of it. But Minotaur's pilot and mobility are also second-to-none. I love seeing the pilot in a pitched battle, crouched down sideways at like a 45 degree angle, not because he can't see but because he just needs to kill everything with his mind bullets. Go win a championship, you crazy Brazillian.
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Dec 8, 2021 02:38
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is pepsi ok posted:What an opening card. This is gonna be the most chaos ever seen on Jan 6th.  (Hahahaha)
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Jan 5, 2022 02:31
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Great Beer posted:Mad Catter was (maybe still is?) built that way. Let's see how that's worked out for them: Yikes.
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Jan 23, 2022 20:52
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I finally got a chance to catch up on the latest ep. Was Tombstone v Mammoth the first double KO in Battlebots? Has this ever happened before in any other league? It seems like it would have by now.
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Jan 29, 2022 19:14
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Team duck should be banned for making such a boring piece of poo poo. I think of Duck like I think of the stax archetype in Magic the Gathering, which is not good. Like, I get the value of a control build but it can be done without being so dang boring. Even the thing's aesthetic design is boring. Remember that weird control bot from years ago that had the lid to an entire sandbox attached to it? It would put the ladybug-shaped dome over opponents and I think there was a vert spinner on the inside that would (theoretically) damage the opponent all the while. It had limited success but, like, iterate on that! These control bots without weapons and what a Magic player would call a "win condition" are just not going to win on points. Control isn't worth enough points, and you're not going to score damage or aggression points without a functional weapon. I genuinely wonder if Duck has ever won a match without their opponent burning out or knocking themselves out somehow.
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Feb 5, 2022 16:26
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Triple Crown is...interesting. Seems overdesigned as hell but hey, gotta learn somewhere right? Its design philosophy does lay bare how the rules favor super-specialization rather than breadth of design. Would it be cool if bots could swap between weapons? Sure. Is it viable or even useful? Probably not. Also: why doesn't it have a third weapon? It seems like they built a spinner and a wedge and then....just ran out of weight?
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Feb 6, 2022 15:34
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PostNouveau posted:Hal Rucker did an AMA and Huh. Good on him for owning the situation. It's so common for people in any situation to pass the buck or make excuses that I'm glad the team took an honest look at theirs and made the right call.
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Feb 8, 2022 02:53
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:Never expect the tear jerker moments from Battlebots... But Daniel Freitas definitely brought it with losing his mom and grandma 2 weeks before filming... Oh man I didn't know that about Frietas. I was happy to see my favorite bot clock a win, but knowing that makes it feel even better. Shine on, you crazy Brazilian.
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Feb 11, 2022 13:48
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KennyMan666 posted:Deep Six vs. Smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee is up: lol
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Feb 13, 2022 13:47
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Qwijib0 posted:Or if you couldn't modify between fights-- so you had to design a bot to reasonably take on all comers rather than being able to slap on or off accessories or different weapons per opponent. One possible outcome of this is of course evolution to homogeneity but that just provides the incentive for a radical new design built to beat whatever had coalesced before. Wasn't there a rule limiting modifications after Hydra v HUGE? (I think it was Hyrda, IIRC). I mean that wide cowcatcher fence... thing that was added specifically to hose HUGE. I know a lot of people thought it was egregious, even if it was in the bounds of the rules at the time. But I can't remember if it actually caused a rule change. Stuff like that seems pretty lame (not to mention it was overkill versus HUGE). At the risk of using yet another MTG comparison, I could see limiting mods similar to sideboards to MTG. You can't swap out your whole deck between games, but you get 15 cards compared to the 60 in your deck, and they're the same throughout the tournament regardless of opponent. In Battlebots, I could see limiting mods to a certain percentage of a bot's weight and/or dimensions, and a team can bring only a certain amount of them into a tournament and just make them work for whatever opponents they draw.
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Feb 14, 2022 01:06
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Whiplash v Skorpios should be really good as a mirror match. I think Whiplash is a bit more stableby virtue of being able to keep its wedge on the ground more often, so it might have the edge. Skorpios is so friggin fast though... I want to see Deadlift execute a clean suplex on that chonky boy Icewave somehow. 
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Feb 17, 2022 02:33
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:Bonus fight up. Interesting it's the 1st we've seen of Big Dill's team captain... wonder why they haven't given them a fight at this point? I wonder about that late hit on Jager. It seemed like a cheap shot on a bot that was already counted out. How salty does this make a team to have to do more repair on a bot due to late hits or unnecessary hits during count-outs? I've noticed some drivers will ask opponents if they want to take more hits during countdowns, but there didn't seem tot be anything like that here. But even forgiving that, the last hit was clearly after the count-out. That just seems like a lovely thing to do, but maybe the teams don't care. I dunno.
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Feb 27, 2022 15:06
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Queering Wheel posted:Having your bot ready to fight and having it work reliably is part of the game though. A perfectly-working Hydra might be a better bot than Glitch, but this season, it wasn't working perfectly. Glitch is a better bot than Hydra this season and deserves its place. Yeah. Tombstone is a good example too. Something is clearly wrong deep down as it is currently built, and as much as like to see it punt opponents across the arena, it's having a rough season. Minotaur has bounced back nicely, though. 
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Mar 6, 2022 19:23
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lol @ HUGE v Switchback. That one is going to be weird.
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Mar 10, 2022 00:15
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:Let's go Minotaur! 
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Mar 16, 2022 13:59
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:NHRL going now, basically non stop fights now as they have 5 boxes, although 1 of them is only for the elimination matches and they are mostly ignoring them... Please tell me the giant, inflatable penguin is a bot in combat.
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Mar 26, 2022 22:26
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PITT posted:I like to hate on shrederator as much as everyone but I feel like some of these guys who keep coming back year after year loss after loss with a smile and a handshake are probably a big part of why the show keeps going and why their hobby community seems as close as it is. They acted nice at the end of that last one, but i've seen the old dude get pretty salty at losses. Like, noticably more than most teams. I'm not saying he's always a bad sport, but there's better examples of good sportsmanship out there.
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Mar 27, 2022 18:21
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It makes way more sense in that context than it does now though. Also: Revolutionist is a million times better as a name.
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Mar 28, 2022 20:21
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I've said it before but I'll say it again: Minotaur has one of the best teams around, and Frietas is a top-tier driver, if not the best.
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Apr 1, 2022 10:55
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So I finally broke down and got Discovery+ in order to watch that last episode in its entirety. (My wife likes DIY poo poo and hate-watching bougie idiots on HGTV, so that sealed the deal.) It was great to bottom, but I feel bad for Vasquez and Whiplash. They got done dirty. Like, I get why the fight was called off the way it was but it just happened to victimize them when they were ten seconds from certain victory. What a way to go. My 7-yo daughter is now hooked too. She had watched some bouts on YT with me before, but she watched this whole ep with me. She has been talking about what she wants to do when she grows up over the last few weeks, but she has never given a full-throated answer. It just seems to be on her mind a lot lately. At the end of that ep she said: "I want to kill robots for a living." I told her that these people do lots of other things between matches, like engineering and construction. "I guess I could build robots too," she said. Then she ran roaring around the room in imitation of Daniel Frietas.
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Apr 3, 2022 10:45
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Sawblaze v Minotaur will hopefully be a fun match, but Minotaur is a tough brick that I could see Sawblaze having a hard time registering significant damage on. Sawblaze could get Minotaur under its forks and just get lit up by that drum spinner. It's a tough matchup for Sawblaze but I'm going to root for whichever team wins that match to win the whole thing. Both teams have great drivers and deserve to win dat nut.
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Apr 5, 2022 12:05
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If the organizers can't get a grip on the toxic, misogynistic crap, then they don't deserve to have those teams around, or to have the de facto "major league" of the sport. I just got a chance to finish watching the finals and the saddest, most infuriating thing was hearing about the crowd's gross reaction toward women. Anyone yelling "c**t" from the stands should have been thrown out and banned from BB events, preferably televised doing so to make an example to others.  My two cents about the matches themselves: Minotaur v. Witch Doctor: Minotaur got done dirty by the stoppage and to some extent the scorecards, but Witch Doctor would have equal grounds to be salty if the decision went against them, given that they were told for half of the fight that their opponent was about to be counted out. I had Minotaur winning on points before the stoppage, but it's hard to say anything conclusively about the second half because of the refs miscommunicating so badly with both teams. Surely a better way to coordinate the refs and teams can be put into place for this sort of thing. What a clusterfuck. Also: the upper deck is poo poo and needs to be completely overhauled. I actually like the idea of shaped areas in the arena to facilitate control bots, but this wasn't the way to do it. It almost never got utilized as it was intended, and just fouled up a bunch of matches along the way. Put some marked, uneven spots in the floor to challenge the ground game, put some shaped parts for control bots and flippers to get ring outs, remove the saws. The hammers I can take or leave, but I guess they're good for the diversity of the meta as they are a way for control bots to score points for anything besides control. Tantrum v. Hydra: Tantrum won, straight up. As a couple people here have said, even if you give Hydra points for control by dictating movement from the center of the arena (which is questionable in its own right), it wasn't aggressive nearly as much as Tantrum nor did it score any damage on Tantrum. Jake can say, "driving in circles isn't aggeession" all he wants, but doing the same at the center of the box isn't either, and he lost on damage to boot. It's not like boxing where you get points for clear shots. You get points for damage, and Tantrum is just a tough lil' brick with a hard chin. There's something to be said for trying to win the damage category during design by making a tough robot. Good for them. Witch Doctor v. Tantrum: What a way to go. I like Witch Doctor, and it's one of like two other bots I like almost as much as Minotaur. They had a hard road to get to the finals, and I feel even worse for them now knowing how the team captain was treated during their match with Minotaur. Still, my daughter and I both agreed that it would have been nice to see either bot win (although my daughter was leaning toward Tantrum because it has those cute eyeballs). I also like the idea of asking bots to return to their respective starting boxes to show controlled movement. It wouldn't totally eliminate weird cases, but it certainly would reduce them.
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Apr 9, 2022 18:50
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Yeah. Come to think of it, the "translational movement" rule is kind of arbitrary as far as being a measure of whether a bot is knocked out or not. If a team is limping in circles and wants to risk continuing a fight to get to time and win on points, let them. Then again, if a bot is disabled enough that it's unrealistic, put the decision on the team to tap out rather than put the decision in the hands of referees.
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Apr 10, 2022 10:34
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:If a bot is crab walking in circles. It should be no problem for the other team to finish the job. No need to make the refs make the decision. Exactly. It adds an interesting choice that a team has to make in the moment, particularly if a fight has gone on into the third minute already. You can tap out and lose but with less damage, or you can bet on the point you've already scored and hope to ride out the clock and take whatever the other bot dishes out in that time. Speaking of which, is there a reason teams can't voluntarily "tap out" as the rules are now? I've just never seen it done, not that there aren't cases where it ought to have been done.
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Apr 10, 2022 10:49
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beepsandboops posted:I know they never made it to the televised stuff, but I still can't over how Hellachopper just straight up used Nazi imagery I did Nazi that coming. Tunicate posted:Heilachopper 
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Apr 14, 2022 23:08
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Hell yeah. I started following NHRL on YouTube and have been watching some of the 3lb division. Some of those bots are bananas. There's one full-body spinner which can barely control its own movement and rips up the floor of the arena wherever it toddles around. But it beats rear end and it's amazing to see that much force out of such a tiny bot.
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Jul 16, 2022 11:15
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I would like Team Whyachi to drop their heel schtick. *Checks earpiece* What's that? It's not a schtick? Welp.
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Aug 6, 2022 01:17
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oh jay posted:He consistently gets a post fight interview even when he loses. Why would he ever stop? Agreed. I'm not saying it doesn't work for him. I'm saying it doesn't work for me. Also: I don't think he can stop even if he wanted to because I think he's genuinely a sore loser/sore winner.
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Aug 6, 2022 01:22
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Borsche69 posted:the madcatter guy? do you listen to what he actually says? its all pretty humble stuff lol I was talking about the driver for Team Whyachi (Hydra's driver).
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Aug 6, 2022 02:34
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logikv9 posted:Sad news!! Yikes! I just got done watching Deep Six v. HUGE in the Golden Bolt tourney. Likewise, I can see why this was done, but it's a bummer anyway. Godspeed, you glass cannon. 
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Aug 24, 2022 18:04
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Great Beer posted:It's not a TV show, but there are tons of small robot fights throughout the year. Most upload some/all their fights to YouTube and a few even make it easy to find those channels Thanks for the link! I'm seriously considering a road trip from Maine to a NHRL event and the December championships sound like a really good time based on the description on their site. It would be a Christmas present for
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Aug 27, 2022 05:32
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I'm getting caught up with the current tournament and just finished the third episode. Here's a hot take: I super, super do not like Glitch. I'm looking forward to them toddling around the box before Tombstone knocks the poo poo out of them. Glitch just not have enough maneuverability or reliability of movement to stand up to anyone in the main tournament. They did a good job against Rotator, but that feels like a fluke, and something they'll be unlikely to be able to do against a field full of drivers as good as Victor Soto.
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Aug 28, 2022 13:54
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Ok. I just watched Kraken v. Blade and here's another hot take for you: I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING 
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Aug 28, 2022 14:06
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Great Beer posted:
I already watched Glitch get into the champions tourney. That's what my post was about. It's weapon is impressive, but the thing sucks out loud and can't move worth a drat. Every fight prior to Rotator was poo poo and it didn't so much "win" as "lose less" than its opponents.
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Aug 28, 2022 17:01
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PostNouveau posted:The floor being mega hosed up is a huge impediment to Glitch. I don't think they'll ever make a deep tournament run if they don't adjust to it. Exactly. The low wedge meta has its limits due to the practical realities of the box, and I feel like Glitch is beyond that limit. Give me a drum spinner that hits like a mack truck but can maneuver for both offense and defense. It's Minotaur I can't wait to see Glitch get turned into chunky marinara by a bot like Tombstone or Endgame. I just watched Blacksmith v. Bloodsport. Instant classic.
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Aug 28, 2022 17:55
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 06:47 |
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So I'm caught up and I just saw the bracket for the final prelim tournament airing this week. Personal bias aside, the mystery boss fight in that one has got to be Minotaur, right? Or maybe Witch Doctor? I'm trying to think of other high-profile, perennially winning bots that haven't already been in these prelim rounds.
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Aug 28, 2022 18:13
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