Combat Robotics

Combat robotics, initially coined Duskbot Wars at a robotics convention in the Dominion of Dusk, was introduced in 713 CE as a way for hobbyist engineers to come together and show off their unique, artistic ways of building technology from home. Duskbot Wars was a tournament consisting of twenty 100lb robots built by engineers across the city, and the crowd that resulted from the tournament gained interest both within and outside of the city.

Duskbot Wars would go on to be a recurring tournament in Dusk, over time gaining robot teams from other nearby cities and towns. In 745 CE, it was first televised as the TV show Duskbot Fight Night. This was a tournament of 54 robots from all over the western continent of Cenara, all in the Superheavyweight class of 500lbs. The winner of this tournament was a combat robot from Ark Town, a full body spinner by the name of Bog Griffin built by the late Cantu Allakoul and his son Teimarr Allakoul.

Bog Griffin

Duskbot Fight Night continues to be a popular combat robotics tournament in Dusk, though sister tournaments and TV shows such as Technobots in Andorough City and King of Magebots in Alumanate City also air. Prestigious schools from all around Cenara participate in miniature combat robotics tournaments, often in large local cities where dedicated arenas are located.

The Modern Meta

While spinning blades are as powerful as they would be in normal combat robotics, most middleweight and higher robots will employ tactics to be as unbreakable as possible, as well as to throw their opponents against various arena hazards as hard as physically possible. Flippers, lifters, full body spinners, and similar are highly popular in the modern robot combat meta for this effect; as a robot's weight increases, it becomes more susceptible to fall and impact damage. A side effect of this meta is that - despite not throwing as many brilliant sparks - the battles often feel much more high-octane and fast with opponents being flung around as much as they are.

Below middleweight classes, spinning blades remain the main meta choice for beginner builders and increasing the speed and energy of the fight.

Combat Robotics In Schooling

In modern day applications, combat robotics is considered a core sport for almost all western schools - stickman or not - and most people taking public schooling courses will engage with it at some point. Combat robotics - the art of building, designing, and battling remote-controlled robots - is a key method to engage with modern technology and engineering, something considered crucial to even the most average individual as the world's technological literacy gradually rises.

School teams for combat robotics are everywhere, about as common as a school basketball or baseball team, and often have similar levels of rivalry within each other. High school and college combat robotics events are frequently televised to local TV stations and uploaded to the internet, as well as discussed on highly populated online forums.

A student's involvement in combat robotics is a large contributor to how certain jobs and colleges will recruit them; the more proficiency and passion they show for this sport, the more likely they will be promoted to higher positions faster.

Combat Robotics in Ch'Chkun

Western faun cities such as Ch'chkun are famous for having the most extreme limits to their combat robotics. Televised events are almost always high-stakes and high-budget, even outpacing Dusk in terms of the amount of effort and passion put into these events. People who compete in Ch'chkun combat robotics are not uncommonly spacecraft engineers and astrophysicists; the engineering that goes into faun-organized robot combat often gets used in spacecraft and military operations, and vice versa.

Ch'chkun has the highest safety regulations of any major robot combat event. Arenas are often layered with multiple walls of bulletproof glass, several meters high, well-ventilated, heavily sealed, and in the center of an empty space at the bottom of an armored pit where shrapnel cannot hit onlookers. Cameras set up inside the arenas broadcast the battles to the audience on large screens, but certain daring individuals have been known to stand right next to the observation lens at the top of the arena in order to get a better look.

Competitors in these events have engineering that breaks the safety rules of nearly every other Cenaran robot combat event, but due to the increased regulations, are allowed to compete in Ch'chkun. Despite the increased safety standards, especially over-eager engineers have created robots that have breached, shattered, or otherwise damaged the arena to a point that the match had to be stopped for repairs. There are dedicated wiki pages online for competitors that have done this.

A famous example of safety breaches in Ch'chkun is a heavyweight competitor named Star Beetle that launched an opponent straight over the arena wall. In following tournaments, a reinforced roof was installed to prevent this from happening again. Star Beetle once again launched another opponent into the ceiling while its opponent's blade was spinning, which led to it being lodged in the ceiling.

Miraculously, there have been no fatalities from these high-octane events, but there have been injuries from glass, shrapnel, etc. One faun has lost an eye from a piece of shrapnel flying out from a crack in the arena wall while they were piloting their robot.

Ch'chkun robot combat tournaments are some of the most popular and hotly discussed events on the Cenaran internet sphere. Entire fandoms are formed based around certain robots or teams, and fanart and fan-animations, edits, memes, etc exist aplenty of them.

While rules and regulations vary across events and even countries, there are a few that are universal regardless of location. The universal weight classes for public events are as follows:

Most televised events vary between middleweight and superheavyweight in the southwest, though the northeast typically keeps robots within pebbleweight and middleweight for televised events. Ch'chkun and Dusk are the only known locations that will host events for dragonweight robots. Multi-champion dragonweight robots are often decommissioned from sport and enlisted into military service in Dusk, with a large payment to their teams as a prize for making a winning robot.

Universal Rules for Robot Building

1. A robot must not enlist liquids, gas, smoke, EMPs, lasers, entanglement, or self-destruction weapons against its opponent.
2. A robot must not be made of hazardous materials such as asbestos, glass, or foam.
3. A robot must not be made of illegal materials such as soulsteel.
4. A robot may not have any form of artificial intelligence or code on board.
5. A robot must have an active weapon. Weapons are usually powered and remotely operated, a part of the motor system of the robot, but a full-body thwackbot or meltybrain can also count as a weapon without additional motorized weaponry.
6. A robot may have up to three minibots, or be made of multiple smaller robots, but the total weight of the main robot and its minibots must not exceed the class weight limit.
7. Spinning weapons must spin down from full speed to stop within 60 seconds if commanded to from the remote controller.
8. A spinning weapon cannot weigh more than 1/2 the full allotted body weight.
9. A robot may not use any form of magic in its build or in combat, unless it is a runebot in allowed regions, in which rules will differ.
10. A robot that does not move via wheels [ie, via legs, brushes, shuffling, etc] is given a weight bonus of 50%. 
11. A robot must be able to exhibit controlled movement at a reasonable speed. Usually, this speed is a minimum of four miles per hour (6.4kph), but is allowed to be slower if the robot is smaller or has a non-wheel movement method.
12. A robot may not be powered by an internal combustion engine.
13. A robot may not employ dragonfuel as a fuel for engines, flamethrowers, or any part of the robot.
14. A robot may not fly, but it may climb the walls if it and the arena is designed for that.
15. A robot must not immediately begin to move when powered on.

Weapon Classes

Combat robot weapon classes are typically split into several groups. These groups do not affect how a robot is seeded in a tournament, and instead exist simply for categorization against other robots.

Spinning Weapons

Spinners are based around blades, cylinders, bars, drums, or discs rotating at high speed. Due to the effectiveness of a spinner to distribute high amounts of kinetic energy over a short period of time, they are one of the most popular forms of combat robot weapon and are easily available in stores and shops dedicated to selling parts for the sport.

Thwackbots and Meltybrains

A subset of spinning weapons, thwackbots and meltybrains rely on spinning blades or impact weapons without a dedicated motor for a spinning blade. These robots are known to be much more reliable long term, as they rely on the full-body spinning of the entire robot as opposed to a single blade, but they are not particularly known for their destructive power.

Flippers

Flippers apply large amounts of pneumatic or hydraulic power to rapidly send opponents flying horizontally or vertically across the arena. Most modern flippers are powered with hydraulics, which allow for powerful interactions without worry of running out of pneumatic gas; however, flywheel-based flippers have also been finding success in the north. Flippers tend to deal damage to their opponents via impact with the ground or with arena hazards, as large robot chasses are more susceptible to damage from their own weight hitting the floor.

Lifters

Lifters are another form of control bot that use a strong lifting arm, wedge, or claw to grab and get under its opponent and disrupt its motion. Lifters are not known to do damage to their opponents, and many are fitted with flamethrowers in order to deal small amounts of actual damage to their opponent.

Crushers

Crushers utilize a weapon that has a single point of contact to provide extreme levels of pressure onto an opponent. These robots are also under the control bot umbrella, and some have been infamous for getting suck in their opponent's armor due to metal splintering under the pressure.

Hammers

Hammers use pneumatic or electric systems to swing their weapon onto an opponent from above, which is useful for disrupting internal components and dislodging motors and wires. Hammers are not especially effective at external damage, though some "pickaxe" variants can pierce through armor.

Flamethrowers

Flamethrowers are rarely a weapon on their own, instead usually being a secondary weapon to a control bot such as a lifter or crusher. Flamethrowers typically employ pure butane or mixtures of butane and oxygen, creating a small but powerful flame that is capable of cutting through tough metals. Unlike earthan combat robotics, it is rare for Cenaran combat robots to deploy huge red flames for showmanship purposes as the messier ignition systems are much more of a hazard.

Runebots

Runebots are a rare class of robot that are allowed to use magic in combat. These robots have ignition runes set inside their chassis, with various exit points for projectiles and other spells to leave the robot. As projectiles are typically finite in standard combat robotics, runebots tend to spec into projectiles or much showier flamethrowers due to the lack of required ammunition. Runebots are only allowed in Alumanate City, Suneil, and Neo Hawa events, making their appearance rare but noteworthy.

As runebots are a unique and new class of combat robot, they are often subject to their own extremely strict rules.

1. Runebots must not break any of the normal build rules.
2. Runebots may not use explosive, corrosive, or destabilizing magic that renders its opponent inert.
3. Projectiles fired by runebots must be easily cleaned up after a battle, or must disappear on their own.
4. A runebot may not use ice or dry ice in its magic.
5. A runebot may not use soulfire or any Soul magic under any circumstances.
6. A runebot may not use magic that destroys or damages the arena floor via plants, stone summoning, etc. 
7. A runebot may not use transformation, matter manipulation, or psionic magic.
8. A runebot using physics manipulation can hold their opponent in the air for a maximum of ten seconds, before giving them time to fight back.
9. A runebot may not manipulate time.
10. Rune usage must be coded to be finite, and a runebot must have a secondary active weapon.

Universal Battle Rules

Depending on the location and host of the event in question, match rules for combatants and staff will also vary. However, there are some rules that have been universally standardized by official tournaments, and they are as follows.

1. Matches are three minutes and thirty seconds long.
2. Both robots must engage with each other at least once every twenty seconds, through touch or weapon contact. If the match goes too long without engagement, it will end and come to a judge's decision.
3. Robots can pin their opponent for up to ten seconds, before they must release and back off at least three lengths of their own robot.
4. If a robot is not showing controlled movement, they must be counted out within ten seconds. The counter does not resume from where it left off if they regain controlled movement and lose it again later.
5. If a robot is unable to release its opponent due to physical damage, the match must be stopped and a judge's decision made.
6. If a robot is stuck on a piece of the arena, or stuck upside down and unable to self-right, it is given one free unstick by a house robot.
   
7. Both teams must be given the option to tap out at any point, for any reason.
8. If there is a lipo fire or the box is filled with smoke from a lipo fire, the match must be stopped for repairs and the area around the arena must be evacuated.
9. If the arena is significantly breached or damaged - ie the walls are broken, the floor is broken, the ceiling is breached, etc - the match must be stopped for repairs.
10. After a minute and a half, the house robot can be turned off via a dial switch on its back. Turning off the house robot does not stop the match or award a win, but a bonus prize is given to any team who can accomplish it.

House Robots

While not present in every local competition, all standardized events [except superheavyweight and dragonweight class battles] will have at least one house robot whose purpose is not to disrupt the battle, but assist combatants in the case one is stuck. House robots typically take on the "brick" shape, and are twice the weight of the competing fighters. These house robots will have a lifting arm that they can use to flip over robots that have been stuck on their backs, and will otherwise move battlers off of offending obstacles that they may be stuck on.

A popular "bonus prize" is to turn off the house robot, which some control bot battlers have dedicated their designs to being able to do. By turning the switch on the back of the house robot, it will be powered off, and can no longer help either robot for the rest of the match. The prize for doing this is a small trophy and cash bonus to the entire team.

Disrupting the house robot in other ways, such as flipping it over or breaking it with hammers or blades, is another way to prevent it from helping their opponent. While these methods do not pay a bonus, they are entertaining, and are allowed on the basis of it being humorous and exciting to watch the brick get flipped.

Cenaran Culture

Combat robotics is one of the few examples of when stickfigure culture successfully leaks into other sophont cultures; being invented by Duskans, combat robotics happened to be a form of combat and violence most other sophonts ended up tolerating and even enjoying in the case of Vishmian fauns. Combat robotics is just as majorly televised and hyped as other popular sports, with thousands of people of all shapes and sizes coming to watch these venues. 

While combat robotics is a continent-wide craze and phenomenon, people on the eastern continent tend to not be as invested or involved in it. Most who do will either do tiny local insect-weight tourneys, or travel hundreds of kilometers just to compete in a major competition across the world. The eastern continent being fairly far removed culturally from the western continent leads to a cultural disconnect of many proportions, including combat robotics.

Most sorcerers in Khartes Trichier did not have access to this sport until approximately 52 years after its invention. With Khartes remaining a relatively rural location with very few introductions to modern technology, most people in the country tend to not pursue combat robotics as a hobby or career.

Media and Fandom

Combat robotics in media has taken over the internet, with all manner of series, cartoons, fanworks, merchandise, and anything else a person can think of related to it. Entire fandoms are formed around robotics teams, as well as music videos, forums, animations, fanart, fan-merch, etc. A particularly popular form of fan merchandise is small 3D-printed model kits of their favorite robots.

It has been observed that there are large communities that engage in shipping of robots with robots and robot captains with captains, sometimes robots with their captains. There is a significant amount of adult media and fanfiction dedicated to this sport in western Cenara.

Military Use

Combat robotics' most famous use case outside of sport is that of military endeavors. The extremely powerful and dangerous spinning blades of many larger combat robots are highly effective weapons against tough opponents, and they are one of the few types of weapons that are reliable enough to pose a substantial threat against potential enemies. Lugus, a famous dragonweight combat robot built by the faun Bantam, has one of its previous iterations currently working in the Dominion of Dusk military.