2024 World Championships Qualifier Spotlight: 12lb
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By Daniel Dischino
(Editor's note: Any opinions presented here are Daniel's, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NHRL.)
12lbers have been the division of parity at NHRL, with several robots occupying the upper echelon of competitive success but no one robot dominating the field. NHRL has run three Championship events at this weight class, and all three have featured different champions.
In 2021, it was the speedy horizontal spinner HotLeafJuice.
In 2022, it was the big-wheeled vertical spinner Ugee.
In 2023, it was the wide control bot Full Court.
Full Court returns this year to defend its title, but 23 other 12lb robots will challenge it for its crown at the 2024 World Championships on December 7th. So far, challengers are undefeated at this weight class, but you never know what trends might break. Will this trend continue, or will we see Full Court become the first repeat champion?
Let’s take a look at three competitors, the defending champion and two challengers, who look particularly primed to put on a show as they fight for the Golden Brett trophy.
These three robots form an interesting strategic rock-paper-scissors, with each design having a noted advantage against one competitor and a noted weakness against the other. On a surface level, they represent the classic trio of the sport—a control bot, a horizontal spinner, and a vertical spinner—but all three take their bot archetype in fascinating directions, resulting in a rock-paper-scissors that looks very different from the traditional strategy.
Unlike every bot Full Court has faced, Slam Plan is more than happy to lose the ground game- it just means it can climb over Full Court’s wedge and splinter something vulnerable and necessary on the other side, while Full Court can do almost nothing to control its opponent. Maximizer, however, can rip through those flat, enormous wheels on Slam Plan while keeping its distance more effectively than any of Slam Plan’s previous opponents. Maximizer is 3-0 against bots in Slam Plan’s archetype, including this marquee win over the progenitor of the style. Full Court, however, feasts on bots like Maximizer, including Maximizer itself at last year’s Championships. Maximizer can’t reach around the wedge of Full Court easily by swinging its tail, unlike most opponents where a swing ends up landing on the side of its opponent. All three bots have a chance to tear through their competition, but these elements of their designs make matchups much harder or easier than average because of their unique constructions.
Full Court (13-8, 1 KOs)
I definitely know people who are shorter than this robot is wide.
Full Court is an extremely wide two wheel drive robot with lifting arms on either side, running alongside its minibot of great renown, Thunder Child. Full Court is built and driven by Coleman Christy, and Thunder Child is built and driven by Nate Franklin.
Strengths
Full Court is a few concepts in robot combat taken to their logical extremes. Wide, not long, body plans are generally considered good for controlling the opponent, as it’s hard to get around to the sides of the robot and get out of its zone of control. Therefore, Full Court is the widest bot realistically possible in the weight class. Ground game, like the forks and wedges commonly seen on all types of robots, is the best thing for a control bot to approach with so it can get under and control its opponent; therefore, Full Court’s entire front face has good ground game.
It can be understood as an artist statement or scientific hypothesis as easily as it can be understood as a combat robot, an exploration of one robot archetype taken as far as it can go and the consequences it incurs. The seeming conclusion this experiment comes to is that such a robot wins very frequently against all sorts of opponents. Full Court will have fights, even against championship caliber competitors, where there is almost nothing the opponent can do to escape its smothering control.
Weaknesses
Full Court’s game plan is heavily dependent on winning the ground game. If it can’t get under its opponent, it struggles to control and push them around, allowing bots to get around that gigantic front wedge and hits to come in on its relatively unarmored drive and lifter pods. As you’d expect from a bot that’s made it this far on the strength of said ground game, it’s not a terribly common occurrence, but some bots have been able to win exchanges. These exchanges usually either occur while Full Court is moving around and the forks have more trouble contacting the ground, or when the opponent just straight out gets under that front end assembly.
Wild Card Factors
Full Court is more of a known quantity at this event, and bots seriously contending for a championship are likely to strategize and configure their robots specifically around being able to beat Full Court in some way. It’s the curse of all strange robot types, once you start doing well enough you always have to adapt to some weird attachment your opponent puts on to deal with your bot while they get to prepare for the same configurations you run against their more standard design. Coleman is a relatively experienced builder, so I’d expect he’ll be just as prepared, but it’s hard to predict other bot’s counters to your design when they’re only now just figuring out those counters.
Maximizer (20-6, 11 KOs)
Every individual part of this bot is pretty, as is the whole product. You don’t see that very often.
Maximizer is a horizontal spinner in the Thagomizer lineage, a line of very long bots that whip around to smack opponents with the weapon on their tail. It is built and driven by Jacob Hoffmann.
Strengths
Maximizer might be the most thoughtfully iterated bot in the world. Jake Hoffman has put a ton of thought and effort into so much of the robot, from optimizing the angle of the spokes on his wheels to the crazy math involved with making the robot land right side up more often than inverted for the most recent version of the machine. Jake’s also put in time to practice specific movements with the robot, and a facet of preparation most other competitors don’t allot time to consider at this stage in the sport’s development. That preparation benefits a bot like Maximizer that relies on a more specific whipping motion to land hits than the typical spinner’s point-and-hit drive style.
This leads into the bot’s second main strength, the odd strategic advantages of the Thagomizer-style horizontal. A wedge on the front of your robot typically counters a horizontal spinner by deflecting the energy of its hits, and forks typically counter a wedge by getting lower to the ground and lifting up the wedge. Thagomizers are horizontal spinners which lead with forks to counter an opposing wedge, or a wedge to counter an opposing horizontal spinner. The spinning motion of their attack allows for hits on the sides and back of the opponent, launching and damaging even opponents that manage to point and face at Maximizer, which is typically a bot’s win condition. Check out this win against another brilliant competitor Blue Marlin, in which Jake disables the fish’s drive side in the first five seconds despite the box rush from Marlin that would normally work wonders on an opposing horizontal spinner.
Weaknesses
As you can see in the second part of that Blue Marlin fight, a big reason why the fight lasted as long as it did was the forks of Maximizer getting bent up and hindering the bot’s control capabilities. This forced Jake to switch to less optimal drive styles, like trying to just time swings of the tail to the movements of the opponents, which is even more difficult than the normal drive style Jake relies on. This is the bot’s second weakness, the generally taxing and difficult style of drive that can go wrong even with the amount of practice Jake puts in. Missed swings aren’t a death sentence, as the bot is built tough enough to take a few hits from top competitors, but it can lead to some less than optimal exchanges for the bot.
Wild Card Factors
Jake, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry, but the wild card factor for this tournament is getting stuck in the sidewall or related shenanigans. So much of the weird nonsense that can happen to a combat robot has been engineered out of this machine, but it remains to be seen if there are still weird issues that Maximizer will run into in the Championships it couldn’t have prepared for.
SLAM PLAN (6-0, 6 KOs)
Wow this bot is big. You might even call it… large.
Slam Plan is a Huge-style vertical spinner, characterized by enormous wheels, a big spinning bar, and a whole bunch of distance between everything else and the opponent. It is built by the newest addition to Team Huge, the Business Cat himself, Brendan Steele.
Strengths
Huge style bots are another archetype based around logical extremes. The only thing 99% of opponents can touch are the wheels and the weapon, which means the only armor Brendan needs to worry about 99% of the time is whether the wheels can hold up to hits and whether his weapon can keep spinning and taking chunks out of its opponent. So far that weapon certainly can keep spinning as long as it wants- Slam Plan won every one of its fights in October by KO, the first three fights ending in under 40 seconds.
Slam Plan feasts on vertical spinners and control bots whose game plans are almost entirely invalidated by its strange body plan. Look at this match against multiple-time Championship qualifier Minor Threat 5, whose highly mobile and smartly driven game can do almost nothing to its gigantic opponent. There’s nothing to hit on the bot that Brendan isn’t ok with you hitting, and there’s a whole bunch on your bot that Brendan can and will hit that you’d rather stay untouched.
Weaknesses
The weakness of basically every Huge style is horizontal spinners, thanks to the big flat surface its wheels provide for horizontals to grab and rip apart. Although its devastating KO power bailed Slam Plan out in this fight, look at the damage Caldera 12 did to those wheels. If Caldera, or any other horizontal at this level, can stay on the outside of its wheels for long enough, it could do some devastating damage and deny Slam Plan an opportunity to wreak its own destruction. It’s also possible for Slam Plan to get stuck on the side of one of its wheels as Luke perfectly predicted in the October event finals, but it’s also possible for it to get back upright afterwards- although it’s hard to know how long it would take the bot to do so without that push from its opponent. A move like that when Brendan’s opponent has full functionality could give the opportunity for an undefended, devastating hit on the unarmored body of the robot.
Wild Card Factors
The sample size of Slam Plan’s fights is minuscule, even compared to the other relatively small careers of the bots in this young and fast-moving sport. We really don’t know how it holds up to a lot of the weird and wonderful top tier competitors in this division, and we won’t know until the Championships.
Also check out Daniel's NHRL World Championships preview for 3lb and 30lb bots.
You can find more of Daniel's robot reviews on his Medium page.