About twice a year, an International RoboWar Tournament is held. Hackers of all ages from around the world submit their best creations to duel for the coveted championship. The rules tend to change slightly from tournament to tournament, so be sure to check your mail about the precise rules. This section describes the tournament utility and general tournament information. It also contains the RoboWar Hall of Fame, listing RoboMasters who have won past tournaments.
Tournament Utility
The new, improved tournament facilities introduced in RoboWar 4.1 support several types of tournaments: complete tournaments, team tournaments, basic tournaments, and test tournaments. The clunky old custom tournaments have been eliminated; if there is something else you really want the tournament utility to do, send in a suggestion. Complete tournaments are similar to what has been called "individual tournaments" in the Fourth through Ninth RoboWar Tournaments (May 1992-January 1995). Team tournaments are also the same as they have been for years. Basic tournaments are like complete tournaments but don't have the Winner's Circle. Test tournaments are for your convenience testing your latest robot against a group of oppontents. Scoring can be done the same as it has been in the past, but there is a new option for "aggressive scoring" which rewards more violent robots.
To run a tournament, choose Tournament from the Arena menu. Choose the type of tournament and enter a filename in which to store the results, then click OK. Select a set of robots from the standard file dialog or choose a custom tournament file. The tournament will run automatically and results will be written to disk.
Each type of tournament except Team tournaments is divided into duels and group rounds. In duels, robots fight one-on-one. In group rounds, randomly selected groups of six robots slug it out. Standard scoring rules give one point to each robot that is alive at the end of the duel (after 1500 chronons, the battle is declared a double win), 3 points to any robot alive at the end of a group battle, 2 to the last to die in a group battle, and 1 to the next-to-last to die in the group. A tie gives the robot the higher score. Hence, robots can do very well by simply surviving, rather than attacking other pacifists.
While this scoring system reflects many aspects of the real world, it can lead to boring tournaments. To encourage more bloodthirsty robots, the "aggressive scoring" system gives an additional point for each kill they make. Suicide and crushing the opponent during a collision do not count as kills. Kills of your teammates and kills scored after your robot has died also do not score your robot points.
RoboWar 4.1.2 adds an "official rules" check box. Under official tournament rules, undocumented features are prohibited and will cause your robot to crash. You can turn this off if you really want in battles with friends, but entries to the official International RoboWar Tournaments must work under official rules.
Team tournaments have similar scoring. In the standard team rules, each team gets one point if at least one member is still alive at the end of the battle. In the aggressive rules, a team gets one point for each member living at the end of the battle plus one more point for each kill a teammember makes.
The results are printed in a plain text file that you can view with your favorite text editor or word processor. Duels and group rounds can be repeated multiple times to reduce the role of chance in the results.
Complete Tournaments
Select a folder full of robots for the complete tournament by choosing one robot in the folder. The complete tournament consists of 4 stages. First, each robot fights every other robot in a duel. Then a bunch of group battles with randomly selected participants are run. The group scores are normalized to compensate for some robots fighting in more groups than others and to scale the average points for a robot in group battle to approximately equal the average from the duels.
The six robots with the highest scores are selected for the Winners' Circle. These six robots fight each other in duels and as a group of 6 and the scores are again normalized to average half of the average from the first stage duels. The robot with the highest sum of points from all four stages is declared the winner.
Complete tournaments will be used to run the Individual category of future International RoboWar Tournaments.
Team Tournaments
Select pairs of robots to participate in the team tournament, then choose cancel when all teams are selected. In the team tournament each team fights every other team and scores are summed to determine the winner. In the future, support may be added for groups of 3 teams to fight, but that feature is not currently implemented.
Basic Tournaments
While designing a robot, you may wish to check how it performs without going through the complete tournament and waiting for winners' circle results. This tournament lets you select the number of times to run a set of robots in duels and group battles. Group scores are normalized as in the complete tournaments. You can also run your robot against five others to simulate a winners' circle. Click on a robot in a folder to select all of the folder's robots for the tournament.
Test Tournaments
For fastest testing, you may wish to test one robot against many others. Select one robot to pit it against each other robot in the folder in duels and against randomly selected opponents in group combat. The tournament will print out your performance against each opponent, your percentage of wins in duels, and group scores of each robot normalized by the number of groups in which it fought.
Tournament Procedure
A typical tournament has three categories: individual robots, teams of two robots, and icons. Individual robots battle with the complete tournament setup. Teams of two battle with the team tournament command. Icon judging is generally done by a squad of montly volunteers munching while watching the other rounds and can be highly subjective. The icon contest title is generally awarded for the best combination of animated icon and sound; of course, entering copyrighted sounds or icons with a robot is illegal without special permission. I reserve the right to delete large sounds from robots before distributing them with the other tournament entries if disk space is tight.
Some tournaments also features the youth category, giving special recognition to the best individual entry written by a hacker under 18 years old. Little League and Titan contests, for bots with 2 and 21 hardware points respectively, were held in the Fifth and Sixth tournaments, but will not be held in the future unless interest picks up sharply.
Many people guard their secret RoboTalk techniques by deleting their source code before distributing their robots. While this is fair enough, one may claim even more fame and glory by distributing a prize-winning robot with complete code. Thus, novice hackers can learn from your example and you can put all sorts of funny messages through your code. Of course, if you borrow code from somebody's robot, you should properly attribute it. A letter to the author might be polite and wholesale copying of the bulk of a robot is obvious unethical.
RoboWar Hall of Fame
The RoboMasters, winners of the past tournaments, are named below:
