CREATUREFEST JULY 2025

[knux400]

Welcome back to the Bot Arena! Today's installment is going to be a bit shorter, as we really only have one new item to cover. Today's match is in The Colosseum against Asklepios, Nemesis, and Hephaistos.
 

"Jackhammers? Seriously? There's so many better weapon options at this point..."

As you can see, Nemesis and Hephaistos aren't anything too special, but Asklepios is using a weapon we've never seen before- in fact, it's technically not a weapon at all! The Zeni PRS is a molecular distributor that can restore structural integrity to robots by rearranging the molecules on damaged parts, slowly bending them back into shape. Similar tools are used in most workshops outside of matches, but this is the first time we'll be seeing a portable unit in the arena itself.

The redistributor is mounted on the weapons platform of a robot, and it cannot be used offensively- meaning that any robot equipped with one of these will be completely unable to attack opponents. Obviously these aren't going to help us at all, since there's no one else for Schmoo to heal and she'd be completely defenseless with a distributor equipped, but they are going to appear in a few upcoming matches.

For this match we'll be giving Schmoo the Torrika KR-2. Since Nemesis and Hephaistos are both using jackhammers, there's no need for specialty long-range weapons here. Staying out of range of Nemesis and Hephaistos will be the easy part here- the hard part will be making sure to damage Asklepios. Any robot with a distributor equipped is smart enough to avoid enemy robots entirely, even attempting to hide behind teammates when they can, and while we can kind of control Schmoo's movement, there's no way to control her targeting system- she'll always fire at the closest target regardless of what orders she's given. So the difficulty in this match lies in maneuvering Schmoo in such a way that she's able to deal damage to Asklepios without getting hit too much by Nemesis and Hephaistos in the process. Once Asklepios is destroyed, Schmoo will be home free- without a healer, Nemesis and Hephaistos will both go down fairly quickly.

On our first attempt, the enemy team was able to trap Schmoo in the corner, completely negating her range advantage! This level of coordination on the part of the enemy team is extremely rare, so I'm honestly more impressed with them than anything. Regardless, it does mean you'll have to skip to 1:18 for the winning attempt here.

"I'm glad one of us is happy about that. My head is still ringing from that absolute dumpster fire of a match."
"You don't have a head. Or ears. Or the capacity to develop tinnitus."