Civilization V

This week not much happened with robots so I'm going to do something random. Recently I got a PC game called Civilization V. I really enjoy the game so I'm going to talk about it. It is a very complex turn based strategy (similar to how a strategy board game is) where you control an empire from the ancient era all the way till the modern era. It is not historically accurate at all except the fact that the people and units were real things and their abilities are based off what they did with their empire. To start off a game you first pick a ruler. There's one ruler per empire or country in the game and they are all the most stressful or famous rulers of that particular country. All rulers have very different abilities involving war, region, influence, food, science, culture, great people, trade, building things, money, and things evolving being on land or water. All of the aforementioned things are complicated aspects of the game and there are a few more. The other really important setting when starting a game is the map. The maps can be completely random, random with restrictions or the same map every time. The map is like the board in a board game like risk. Once you start the game all you have is a settler which starts cities and a warrior to protect your city and explore. Your cities do a variety of things too and you can conquer destroy and puppet them. The goal of the game is to be the first of the many other empires or civilizations your playing with to complete one of the victory conditions. The victory conditions include things like conquering everybody else, having tourism and culture, science, and being elected as world leader. The game is mostly signal player but does have a multiplayer mode. I would suggest it to anyone into complex strategy games and board games.

More Prototyping

This week nothing new happened but I did continue prototyping. I have to experiment with a lot of  new ideas because the next stage of the completion will be a million times harder. The other teams at that event will also have qualified and it isn't till April so they will be a lot better. This week I tried an intake idea to quickly get the balls but that didn't work. I also tried to do a one wheel fly wheel (normally two wheels spinning in opposite directions that shoot a ball) but that didn't seem to work that well either. I started working on another idea where the balls are picked up in a similar way to my other robot except that that is also the storage. From there it could be lifted up by a sort of arm and as it tilts the back will become a ramp and the would fall into the goal. There's a lot of prototyping ahead so will see what the robot transforms into.

Prototyping

This week I started making new robot prototypes. I started doing this because while I did qualify rather easily the next competition is in March so teams will have plenty of time to improve and all the teams at this next event will have qualified too. Not only that but there will be more teams competing for a few spots to get to the next level, worlds. I really want to get to worlds because you get to compete against teams from all over the world like China or England and because I would get to travel to Kentucky. My current robot can only score one point per ball because it doesn't shoot. To even have a chance of qualifying my new robot has to shoot. There's a lot of other things I want my robot to be like be small, fast, powerful, get balls fast, and shoot balls fast. Not every condition will be met so I have to decide which traits will help my team score more points. Right now I am prototyping specific parts of the robot such as the intake or the base but once I find out what works and what doesn't I will put it all together in one robot. That's all for now bye.