There isn’t much that can prepare you mentally for actually having an opportunity to fight for the Giant Nut. Many members of Team HUGE have had opportunities to win events in the past, whether that be local events or NHRL tournaments. And we’ve even actually won some of them! But the specific stresses, the atmosphere, the effort level, and the costs of Battlebots just make it something exceptional compared to anything else. This is the moment you dream of.
With a win in the Round of 8 over Witch Doctor, we realized that World Championship 7 was crossing from “a great year” into something even more magical. To be fighting for a spot in the finals, after the last 2 seasons HUGE had, served to show how far we had come and how much we had learned.
Copperhead would be our third opponent in a row that was a very short, compact, and highly-competitive vertical spinner. For lack of a better term, we had talked a lot of smack talk for a long time about the small-vertical-spinner type of opponent. And in our last two fights, HUGE lost the use of its weapon due to getting punched very hard upwards (MadCatter) and hitting a very solid object (Witch Doctor).
As for Copperhead, looking at the bot, they appear to have two main design goals:
Punch things upwards very hard
Be a very solid object for people to hit
Crap.
And just like that, HUGE sneaks into the playoffs as the #14 seed in our rookie season! This exceeded our expectations massively, as our whole goal for the season was just to win a single fight. For our first round matchup, we faced the 2015 champion Bite Force. Bite Force came in as the #3 seed off of a 4-0 season, and was another extremely experienced team for us to fight.
Icewave was a veteran competitor in their third season, and had a reputation as one of the most damaging horizontal spinners in the competition. They were riding especially high after splitting Vanquish in half in an earlier fight.
As part of our design for HUGE, we knew that it would be weak to a sideways hit….
HUGE’s third fight of the regular season was against the hammer robot Chomp. Chomp had been a part of all three reboot seasons, and was returning as a Top 8 competitor from 2016 after famously defeating Bite Force. Coming into the fight at 0-2, we knew that Chomp would be desperate for a win. Chomp was well designed to hurt HUGE because HUGE’s armor was just 1/16” Titanium sheeting during the 2018 season.
Our second fight of the 2018 season was against Free Shipping, a robot built from the base of 7-time ‘Robogames’ and 3-time ‘Combots Cup’ champion Original Sin with the addition of a forklift and a gigantic flamethrower. Similar to SubZero, we didn’t know much of what to expect from Free Shipping. It was a robot new to Battlebots, with a very unique weapon and enough fire to make us worried.
HUGE’s first ever fight in the Battlebox was against the veteran team and ‘Battlebots at Sun Java/One’ champion SubZero. Their only fight before this during modern Battlebots was a loss to Icewave in 2016 where they showed a lot of toughness, so we didn’t know what to expect going into this fight.
