Clash of Titans Season 5, Round 1.

[u/KenfromDiscord]

Rules

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Out of Tier Rules

As this is a debate tournament, it would be a bit silly to not be allowed to debate things. As such your debate skills will be put to the test if or when your Opponent calls your characters OOT during the Rounds. Simply debate better than your opponent and your characters will stay in the tournament. OOT arguments in the tournament proper will be handled as a separate decision from the main judgements. How this works is that, should you argue OOT, whether you were successful will be decided by a judge vote, and then the judgements will proceed taking the result of the vote into account

Battle Rules

Speed - Speed is equalized to Mach 12, Combat and movement speed, with their reactions scaled down/up relatively. Speed boosts via abilities, however, are indeed allowed to make one surpass this base speed threshold.

Battleground:

Round 1 takes place in the roman colosseum One team starts at one end, the other team starts at the other end.

For the sake of the tourney there will be no people in the Colosseum.

Your characters cannot leave The Colosseum, its an automatic loss if you do. Your characters can still interact with things outside of The Colosseum if they have the ability too. E.g, Magneto can still interact with the metal buildings in Rome however he cannot physically leave the park.

Submission Rules

Tier: Must be able to win an unlikely victory, draw/near draw, or likely victory against Thor Slowdenson in the conditions outlined above and in the sign up post. All entrants will be bloodlusted against Thor, meaning they will act fully rationally and put down their opponent in the quickest, most efficient manner possible regardless of morality, utilizing any and all possible techniques/tactics/attacks if necessary. The bloodlust does not give any foreknowledge of Thor or his capabilities.

Debate Rules

Rounds will last 4-5 days, hopefully from Monday until Thursday or Friday of each week of the tourney; there is a 48 hour time limit both on starting (we do not care who starts, you and your opponent can figure that out) AND on responses, AND ADDITIONALLY each user MUST get in two responses or else be disqualified. If one user waits until the very last minute to force this rule to DQ their opponent without any forewarning to their opponents or the tournament supervisors, they will be removed from this tournament, no exceptions. Format for each round: both respondents get Intro + 1st Response, then 2nd response, then a 3rd response and closing statement individual of one another that can be posted any time after both 3rd responses are complete. EACH RESPONSE MUST BE NO LONGER THAN THREE REDDIT COMMENTS LONG WITH A HARD CAP OF 25,000 CHARACTERS SPLIT BETWEEN THE THREE.

Brackets Here

Round 1 is a 1v1.

Round 1 ends Saturday June 5th.

[u/GuyOfEvil]

General Discussion of Freezing as a Win Condition

I have a few other things to say about freezing, so I think I'll put all of them here. This'll partly be restating and collecting points from previous sections, and partly new argumentation.

• My opponent cannot prove the instant freezing is literal

As an additional point here, my opponent will probably respond to this with something like "FUCK you, FUCKER dont you FUCKING know that its the FUCKING future, and FUCKING besides its a FUCKING video game MOTHERFUCKER, the freezeFUCKING just FUCKING works like that FUCK!!!!!"

So I just wanna point out that something that also works like that is smoke pellets. You don't see the actual pellets and the smoke appears almost instantly. It's pretty obvious how smoke pellets work, and that it isn't like this. So I think "the freezing is so big and instant for gameplay clarity purposes and not literal" is an extremely fair and likely true interpretation.

• We have little information about what tactics his characters favor, and no information about how they would approach a 1v1. It cannot by any stretch be absolutely guaranteed they will use freezing as a strategy

  • Even if they will use freezing eventually, there is no way to guarentee they will spam freeze my team and not just give up after trying once and my team just instantly breaks out

• His team cannot attack mine after they are frozen

Something my opponent has conveniently glossed over is that, in Into The Breach, if you attack an opponent that is frozen, they break out. So, what will happen is, his characters will freeze mine, and then try and attack them, the attack will break the ice before hitting my character, and they will be able to easily defend against whatever the attack is.

This is assuming my characters don't just break out of the ice in the first place. My opponent's response is just "they get frozen again". But all this results in is a loop where my character gets frozen, then they unfreeze themself, then they get frozen again, then they unfreeze themself and so on and so forth until the pilot decides that actually I have like 50 other weapons what the fuck am I gaining from this exchange.

Of course, it may look like im ignoring the possibility of pushing, which wouldn't break the ice, but pushing isn't actually a viable win condition.

First, the rules say

Your characters cannot leave The Colosseum, its an automatic loss if you do.

Which does not specify being forced to leave The Colosseum as a lose condition.

And maybe a judge thinks thats a stupid rules hack. If you do thats totally fine, its not a viable win condition anyways. There isn't a way to ring somebody out of The Colosseum, its walled in. His team can push my team into a wall.

And to this he'd probably argue his character just breaks the dome, but as it says in sign-ups, "Assume every arena is indestructible, and covered in an appropriately sized dome of WhoWouldWinium.". The arena is indestructible and covered by a dome. Ring out is impossible.

So even if you buy literally no arguments I have made before this, freezing is a terrible win condition.

[u/GuyOfEvil → u/GuyOfEvil]

Space Racer vs Abe

Does Killing the Pilot kill the submission

As a point of order, I asked Ken if duplicate submissions are allowed, and he said he gave Elick special permission, so I'm going to drop argumentation about the nature of characters or who is the character or whatever.

However, I still think the mortal status of the pilot is fairly relevant to this debate. My opponent says it is not because Mechs can be piloted by A.I, however this statement has a couple big problems.

Firstly, the Composite Mech problem rears its head again. Since "Composite Mech" is a new creation unique to this debate, there would not be an A.I programmed to pilot it.

Secondly, from the evidence provided now, it seems that the A.I Pilot is chosen at the start of the mission. Is there any evidence that an A.I Pilot can take over for a pilot killed mid combat?

Thirdly, we have less than 0 information about how an A.I Pilot would act. We know that they are "capable of combat" and the wiki recommends you try and have them kill themselves. Will they come up with the extremely complex strategy my opponent proposes? No, almost certainly not.

And even if the A.I Pilot can activate and act with some degree of competence, this still isn't a particularly hard fight for Space Racer. He can just shoot out one of the Mech's legs and it won't be able to move anymore, or just generally shoot center mass and probably hit some critical piece of machinery that the mech can't operate without. Even if killing the pilot does nothing, Space Racer would likely need at most 2-3 shots to disable or generally destroy the mech. This is made a lot easier by the fact that they will make 0 effort to dodge attacks

So if relying on the A.I Pilot will either be impossible or severely strategically cripple the Mech, the question of who will act first becomes pretty important.

Quickdraw

My opponent's argument here is terrible and completely sidesteps my entire argument. He says that his character will be able to act instantly because the travel time of the ice thing is instant. This is totally nonsensical.

Let me remind us all that All combatants begin without any weapons drawn or abilities active, hands idle at their sides, weapons holstered.

So the freezing generator will not activate instantaneously, before it can activate Abe has to figure out the situation, figure out what strategy he will use in the situation, and then presumably press some kind of button to activate the freezing field. This will not happen instantly for a large variety of reasons.

Abe has never been inside the "Composite Mech" before. He will, at minimum have to do a quick scan of where the thing that activates the freezing thing is and how to activate it. The fact that he has piloted many mechs before will not help him with this, unless my opponent can demonstrate a universal standardization in the Into The Breach universe for where the "activate freezing weapon" button is.

But further from that, even if he knows where everything is and how to activate it, he won't instantly come up with a strategy, he'll probably consider one of the huge amount of offensive, defensive, and utility options his mech has access to. This will take time.

At minimum, the opposing character has to go "ok I have these options but im gonna do the freeze strat I come up with guarenteed lets press the button that freezes my opponent" and then go from hands at his sides to pressing the button that freezes his opponent.

Space Racer spawns in knowing he has to fight his enemy, his single method of doing that is his gun, so he will off rip draw his gun and fire.

There's no way Space Racer isn't acting significantly faster. And once he's acted again, all he has to do is pull a trigger pointed at his opponent. If he somehow gets frozen, it will be trivially easy to just do this once he gets unfrozen, and since according to my opponent Abe will not consider a ring out strategy unlike either of his teammates, this situation will happen for certain.

Conclusion

Space Racer will almost certainly be the first person to act in this fight, from his first shot he will most likely either destroy a critical operating component of the mech or kill Abe, either winning him the match outright or severely crippling the mech strategically. If neither of these happen, he can easily just take out a leg to win.

Yomi vs Chen Rong

I will first point out that, just by flaring his ki and grappling, Yusuke destroys a large rock formation. This kind of thing is something pretty much everyone with ki can do, and Yomi has the most ki of almost anyone in the series. If he is frozen in ice, he can just do this and break out instantly.

He will be able to do this fast enough that Chen Rong won't actually meaningfully accomplish anything. He can freeze him again, but it won't matter, Yomi will just do this again. Freezing is a non win condition against Yomi.

And even if it were, Chen Rong is going to try and win via ring out, something I've previously demonstrated to be totally impossible. That alone makes this fight a total wash.

So if freezing is a non-starter, Yomi can just kind of keep attacking the mech and eventually win. Chen Rong will apparently spend the entire time pursuing an impossible dream, or just generally not trying to kill Yomi, whereas Yomi has 0 qualms with killing people. He literally eats humans.

My opponent has pretty much just ignored any kind of argument about physical confrontation, so I'll just briefly restate my arguments here. Yomi has far more durability and stamina than the mech, and can block any kind of esoteric. He easily wins a stand and punch style confrontation.

Esfandiyār vs Ralph

My opponent is really harping on the cold anti-feat for Esfandiyār, but its literally not an anti-feat. Esfandiyār stood in a blizzard that covered the entire planet for three days praying, and was not harmed If my opponent could point out the part of this feat where Esfandiyār is harmed by the cold that would be super sick of him.

So what we have for a "freezing anti-feat" is that Esfandiyār stood in a blizzard for three days that made the entire earth covered in snow and desolate. Kinda sounds like a cold resistance feat to me.

And even if its not, this feat also features Esfandiyār praying to God, and Him responding by causing a planet covering amount of snow to vanish. He could easily do the same for some ice. My opponent says he'll just get refrozen, but God can just make it vanish again. There's no way Ralph would be like "damn every time I freeze this guy the ice literally vanishes. This is a very effective method of fighting and I will continue to pursue it"

And again I'll just quickly restate, Esfandiyār easily beats a mech in a physical confrontation with arrows and being strong and being able to lift the mech. Freezing is a dogwater win condition and its all my opponent has.

Conclusion

For my opponent to even reach the starting line of debating 1v1s he has to

• Make up his mind about if what we see in gameplay is literal or not

• Prove his characters can move and support their own weight

• Prove my characters wont act 2x as often as his

And if he can do all that, he will have to further prove

• His characters will act at all like he describes they will

• That his win condition is even remotely effective.

And once he has done all that, he is left with three losing 1v1s. He has literally no hope of winning this round.

[u/Elick320 → u/GuyOfEvil]

Honestly my opponents right, I don’t even know what Diagetic means

In the case of if his characters are mountain busting, he tells us that looking at the game itself is unreasonable, after all, the mountains have snowy peaks or are volcanoes, so logically they're just smaller for clarity purposes. It would be absurd to assume otherwise.

My opponent seems to agree with me that the mountains are, indeed, mountain sized. Sweet, glad that's no longer a point of contention.

Or, we should take a more logical and rational approach and assume that what happens in gameplay is not exactly 100% literal. In this case, the freezing attack likely does not have a travel speed of infinity, and my opponent cannot establish a travel speed for it, meaning it can be dodged. This completely throws out his win con.

Alright, maybe it doesn't have an infinite travel time, but we can show some upper end speed to prove what exactly it travels faster than. Of course, assuming it does have infinite travel time is kinda stupid, after all a normal human could say the same for a bullet, since they can’t perceive the fact that that its moving at several times the speed of sound, unless they track it over a distance of multiple kilometers.

So let's compare the speed of this, to things that actually exist in both real life, and in the game.

• A rail gun
  • Rail guns don’t really exist in a practical capacity in real life, and aren’t standardized to the extent that guns are, so they vary a lot. However, a few military railguns have been produced, and have been able to fire projectiles at excesses of mach 5. From the wikipedia page on railguns;
  • >The first weaponized railgun planned for production, the General Atomics Blitzer system, began full system testing in September 2010. The weapon launches a streamlined discarding sabot round designed by Boeing's Phantom Works at 1,600 m/s (5,200 ft/s) (approximately Mach 5) with accelerations exceeding 60,000 g During one of the tests, the projectile was able to travel an additional 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) downrange after penetrating a 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) thick steel plate. The company hopes to have an integrated demo of the system by 2016 followed by production by 2019, pending funding. Thus far, the project is self-funded.
• A tank cannon
  • Tank cannons are notably more real and widely used than railguns, so if the ice generator can cover a map in ice faster than a tank cannon can move across the distance the ice generator can cover, then how fast do tank cannons fire?
  • Wikipedia says that “High velocity tank guns fire between 470 and 1020 m/s, while hypervelocity tank guns fire above 1020 m/s”
  • Obviously we can’t really assume that this tank shot is hypervelocity, because that would be unfair, but we if take the median of the 470-1020 m/s estimate, we arrive at 745 m/s, which is mach ~2.19
• A arcing explosive
  • Muzzle velocity of the modern howitzer is 827 m/s, arriving at ~mach 2.43, even faster than our last comparison.

So there we have it, we compared the speed of the ice generator to 3 things that exist in real life. Visually, the ice generator is faster than these objects, but my opponent isn’t buying the “instant travel time” argument, I will instead compare this to these three objects, which have a travel time of mach 2.19 on the low end, and mach 5 on the high end. The arena, the roman colosseum, has a maximum radius of 83 meters. If we assume that the mech is as far as possible away from its enemy, that means that the the entire arena freezes in 111.38 ms at the low end), depending on which projectile you trust more, the actual existent tank shot, or the slightly more theoretically but still existent railgun.

There we have it, ice generator moves faster than estimated modern military equipment, and which still means fast as fuck if we don’t take the whole “moving at intant speed” thing literally.

But we still take one thing from the game. The ice generator still freezes everything in its radius, only leaving things unharmed when they aren’t in its radius. As shown earlier, the roman coliseum is 83 meters long. If mountains are indeed to taken to be mountain sized (as my opponent has helpfully agreed to), then the ice generator will have no problem freezing the entire arena, since exiting the coliseum is an instant DQ by the laws of the competition

Even if it's slower than originally described, it still freezes the entire arena.

So why can't it be said that characters in Into The Breach can bust mountains because the devs wanted mountains there for more interesting map design, and the characters aren't intended to be giving and taking literal mountain busting damage? Why can't it be said that the devs chose to make the freezing effects look the way they do for visual clarity and not literally because the mechs are generating that much ice? Once my opponent opens up the can of gameplay being non-literal for the mountains, he can't just bring that one in and then shut the door to all other ones.

I’m sure the devs just accidentally spent nearly 3 years accidentally coding those mechanics, mechanics such as deep bodies of water being frozen. This is just like me claiming these scans of yomi destroying a huge rock formation just… magically showed up in the manga without the artist intending it to, IE: completely ridiculous. I could argue the same vague bullshit, how do we know that's what the artist intended? How do we know what kind of power he wanted demonstrated? We're battleboarders, we can’t just ask the author what they intended with something (that's how we get shit like universal kratos and doomslayer), we go off what we can see.

Bringing up artist intent in battleboarding is dumb.

Either all gameplay is literal or none of it is, my opponent is currently in a state of picking and choosing what is and isn't literal to suit him, but this is obviously not the correct interpretation, it's just what he's choosing to make it look like he can win this debate. Don't just gloss over this point, because as it stands my opponent is clearly just picking and choosing what is or is not literal.

Then what, if I may ask, is the correct interpretation? If one can’t be listed, then my interpretation is just as valid as any other interpretation, and has to be backed up with evidence. And I have backed up my end with evidence, while my opponent has mostly just said “nuh uh” and guyposted for 40k+ characters.

I’m gonna paraphrase the next argument.

It's never stated what a “composite mech” looks like and it's impossible to argue something that has no definite form, and such this pick doesn't exist and can’t be argued.

I would like to bring back up my exact stipulations, used on all 4 of my picks.

Assume this official art indicates the canon size of the mech, using this body as well. No power grid required, The pilot inside the mech is Ralph Karlsson. Use only feats from the linked RT and the game itself, and not the RT on the subreddit.

Let's examine this bit.

Assume this official art indicates the canon size of the mech, using this body as well.

Now let's highlight the important bit.

Assume this official art indicates the canon size of the mech, using this body as well.

There we go, what the mech looks like, proven in the stips. But just for fun, let's refute these next ones.

Can his characters move? How?

By walking, flying, jumping, or dashing

Can his characters support their own weight, or would they just collapse instantly a second into their existence

This mech sure seems to be doing it fine

Is his character capable of fighting?

The mech is pretty cool, eh punches the bugs and doesn't afraid of anything

[u/Elick320 → u/Elick320]

Turn based combat? More like, turn cringe combat

In my first response, I asked my opponent if his characters will act in real time or in a turn based manner. His response was that this question does not matter because speed is equalized.

This answer fundamentally does not make sense. A character taking an action, then waiting for a bit while an enemy takes an action, then taking another action, and so on and so forth is not a function of speed, it is a function of how a character acts.

If his characters fight like the fight is turn based and my characters do not, it is a massive advantage for me, because my characters can literally act twice as much. Even if everything my opponent said was true, his team would not be able to win if my team had literally 2x the time to act. This is another argument that will ascend into the "my opponent has to answer for this or he loses outright category"

This… what? Literally what the hell does this even mean? Speed equalized means speed equalized. If a character moves 2x as slowly as another character, then speed equalization means they should move at equal speeds, that's how it works man c'mon opponent you know this. Being from a turn based game doesn’t suddenly make speed equalization… not speed equalization.

Speed equalization, literally as a concept, means to “have characters move at the same speed for the sake of an even competition,” and, “not to have to argue speed during a fight, and having the fight be a pure physicals and smarts vs physicals and smarts”

This isn’t arguing that a kaiju punches slower because of speed equalization over a bigger distance, which in some circles actually makes sense. This is literally my opponent going “speed equalization doesn’t apply because… video game!” Which is outlandish and stupid.

If I have to argue that my characters will act in character one more time I will actually scream

Let's just appreciate this for a moment. My opponent is claiming that, based entirely on one single paragraph about his characters' jobs before the game, that he can tell with absolute certainty what they will do in a situation unlike anything they have ever experienced before. If this is true he has an extremely bright future in foreign policy, or perhaps as a TV psychic.

Well I humbly accept this compliment and will take my future assured career as a political adviser

My opponent finally acknowledged the existence of the character bios I put into my stipulations. Unfortunately this has raised a new argument, summarized as follows.

There is no way to logically discern how characters will act based on a single paragraph of bio, and each character has a very specific plan they have to enact to win each matchup. There's no way for us to assume that these characters go with this plan.

This goes both ways. Let's go over each of my opponents characters.

Yomi

• Has never fought a mech before
• Has no idea that there's even a pilot inside, it might be a robot
• Probably doesn't even assume the thing in front of it is real (A demon from the underworld ain't exactly familiar with mecha)

So how does my opponent know that this dude is even going to open up with a mountain busting attack? How does he even know that Yomi attacks in the first place? From Yomi’s wikipedia page:

Yomi is a calm, calculating fighter, being able to measure the exact speeds of the opponent's attacks with his hearing, and activating his barrier at the moment of impact so as to not waste energy.

If Yomi is a calculated fighter, then what’s to say he even opens up with a powerful attack against this thing? He doesn't know the capabilities of this mech until it attacks, hell, he probably doesn’t even know what a mech is.

We don’t know how he’ll open up because he’s never fought a mech before. We don’t even know if he’ll engage the mech in the first place, he probably thinks it's a statue or something. My opponent is making just as many assumptions about how his characters will act as I am.

I feel like I’ve gotten my point across well enough, but just in case, I’ll keep going with my opponents' other characters.

Space Racer

• As far as I know, has never fought a mech before
• It’s unlikely he’s unfamiliar with the concept, he is a future space alien after all
• It's perfectly in character for him to shoot the mech, unlike the other characters

Esfandiyār

• An ancient warrior from iranian mythology
• Literally has no concept of what a mech is, or hell, what a robot is, or hell, what technology is
• As such, he’s just as likely to fight the mech standing in front of him as the random rocks littering the arena. To him the mech is just a giant, green, slightly metallic statue. It's like being teleported to an arena and automatically assuming the building in front of you is what you're trying to fight, it just doesn’t happen like that.

This is just like Yomi, we don’t know how Esfandiyār would fight what he assumes is probably a statue, because he’s never fought a mech before. Or maybe I skipped across a few pages of iranian mythology, I’m sure my opponent will show me if I have.

I’m allowed to make assumptions about my characters fighting things they’ve never fought before, and my opponent is allowed to make assumptions about characters fighting things they’ve neve fought before. I’ve said this before, but… We're battleboarders, our entire craft revolves around making assumptions. Saying I’m not allowed to make assumptions while my opponent is already making assumptions is ridiculous.

Freezing is effective for a simple reason

So I just wanna point out that something that also works like that is smoke pellets. You don't see the actual pellets and the smoke appears almost instantly. It's pretty obvious how smoke pellets work, and that it isn't like this. So I think "the freezing is so big and instant for gameplay clarity purposes and not literal" is an extremely fair and likely true interpretation.

• We don’t even see any smoke pellets being deployed
• We do, in fact, see the smoke not instantly appearing, but taking a few hundred milliseconds to appear to full size
• Weapon names in Into the Breach are not to be taken literally. Here are some examples:
  • Mercury fist
  • Shock cannon
  • Astra bombs
  • Hermes engines
  • Vulcan artillery
  • Raining death
  • Grav well
  • Heat converter
• There's another weapon, that ACTUALLY deploys actual smoke bombs, you can see that here

Trying to use “smoke pellets” as an argument against the ice generator freezing things is… shaky at best.

Something my opponent has conveniently glossed over is that, in Into The Breach, if you attack an opponent that is frozen, they break out. So, what will happen is, his characters will freeze mine, and then try and attack them, the attack will break the ice before hitting my character, and they will be able to easily defend against whatever the attack is.

Let us also remember that attacks that break ice will nearly always push the ice back as it’s being broken

This is assuming my characters don't just break out of the ice in the first place. My opponent's response is just "they get frozen again". But all this results in is a loop where my character gets frozen, then they unfreeze themself, then they get frozen again, then they unfreeze themself and so on and so forth until the pilot decides that actually I have like 50 other weapons what the fuck am I gaining from this exchange.

In a speed equalized environment, actions are taken one at a time. Punching yourself out of a block of ice is an action, activating the ice generator is an action. Shooting the mech is an action, the mech bombing the shit out of the enemy after it breaks out is an action, if it even can break out.

None of my opponent’s characters show any resistance to the cold whatsoever, and I don’t see why coldness resistance isn’t held to as high of a standard as heat resistance. You can’t just assume that a character with no heat res feats is able to survive fire that, say, melts a mountain. But for some reason it's perfectly ok to assume that a character with no ice resistance feats will just… shrug off being near-instantly frozen in mountain freezing ice and subsequently break out like nothing happened? I don’t buy it. This is a clear double standard that my opponent should be held accountable for.

paraphrased to save character count:

Your characters can’t win due to ring out because of how the arena works. Characters are physically locked in the arena by whowouldwinium which is impassable by any means, so therefore you can’t win due to ring out

I’m gonna have to apologize for this one. The signup post and the round 1 post shows conflicting information, with the round 1 post saying that you get disqualified if you leave the arena, which kinda implies that you can leave the arena, which the signup post would clearly contradict. From now on I’ll assume that my characters cannot win due to ring out, but they also know this fact (because as said in the signup post, characters passively know the rules of the competition)

In case the judges have talks over whether these conflicting rules will allow victory by ring-out, these win conditions still apply, but going forward I’m arguing under the impression that they are not.

[u/Elick320 → u/Elick320]

Individual matchups, first up, Space Racer vs Abe Isamu

I like how Ken automatically knew Guy was talking about me when asking that question thats comedy gold

Firstly, the Composite Mech problem rears its head again. Since "Composite Mech" is a new creation unique to this debate, there would not be an A.I programmed to pilot it.

Composite mech implies is has nearly all* functions of each mech in the game, which, includes, having an AI pilot

Secondly, from the evidence provided now, it seems that the A.I Pilot is chosen at the start of the mission. Is there any evidence that an A.I Pilot can take over for a pilot killed mid combat?

I don’t see why it wouldn’t, either we make some liberal interpretations and say it does, or we go by the literal gameplay which shows that pilots literally can’t die until their mechs are destroyed. The last one is ridiculous so I’m going with the first.

Thirdly, we have less than 0 information about how any A.I Pilot would act. We know that they are "capable of combat" and the wiki recommends you try and have them kill themselves. Will they come up with the extremely complex strategy my opponent proposes? No, almost certainly not.

“Freeze the enemy” is not an extremely complex strategy. If literally any semi-intelligent AI realizes that freezing is effective as a form of damage, then it's going to use it often. That's not knowing how the AI works, that's basic combat knowledge that anyone who knows combat in the slightest will exploit.

And even if the A.I Pilot can activate and act with some degree of competence, this still isn't a particularly hard fight for Space Racer. He can just shoot out one of the Mech's legs and it won't be able to move anymore, or just generally shoot center mass and probably hit some critical piece of machinery that the mech can't operate without. Even if killing the pilot does nothing, Space Racer would likely need at most 2-3 shots to disable or generally destroy the mech. This is made a lot easier by the fact that they will make 0 effort to dodge attacks

• Mechs have never had individual limbs cut off, even by Vek with clearly sharp claws
• Mechs have never had critical machinery taken out to instantly disable them, mech have no critspots, and to assume a huge machine like that has some sort of “instant disable if you shoot here” spot is ridiculous

Oh yeah, another thing, Space Racers gun literally sucks

I’ll go over every shown feat from his gun, and focus on a particular detail that makes it bad

• Shoots through an asteroid, notice how small the actual projectile is
• Shoots through a Viltrumite, this projectile is shown to be a tiny bit wider, but nothing compared to how big the mech is
• Destabilizes a planet's core by flying straight through it
  • Gravity is doing most of the work here, not the gun. I suspect my opponent knows that already but I just want to say it here
  • We see a single optical illusion that shows the size of the projectile, and because of that I’m not counting it
• We see it pass through the top of someones head, a more definitive size than anything before but still, nothing compared to how big the mech is

This gun is never shown to have any destructive capacity whatsoever besides the normal effects of something fist sized passing through something unimpeded. And seeing how big the mech is and how small the projectile is, the gun won’t really be a problem. This is one of the few times where surface area actually plays in favor of the big thing in battleboarding, and I will take full advantage of it.

A tiny little hole will not disable the mech. A bunch of tiny little holes will not disable the mech. Space Racer will have to shoot the mech an absurd number of times for this to do anything

Also keep in mind, the mech has no problem instantly repairing mountain level damage, a couple small holes mean nothing, especially if the mech can probably heal hundreds of them at once, and then just tank space racer shooting more while it's happening.

All this assuming he doesn't get frozen instantly, which he still does.

I’ll summarize my response to the quickdraw argument because I’m really running low on characters

What’s to assume that Space Racer decides to instantly quickdraw and shoot the mechs “canopy?” is it even obvious where the pilot is sitting here? Going “Abe has to go through complicated bullshit to activate the ice generator” and then turning around and saying “but Space Racer just shoots him lol, he also hits the pilot perfectly and then gets on his bike and keeps shooting anyway don’t worry about it” is hypocritical.

Yomi vs Chen Rong

If ring out is impossible, Chen won’t pursue it, because he is instinctively told the rules of the competition. And as shown in Into the Breach, if the needs of the many outway the needs of the few (getting a wish to instantly save his planet? Hell yeah!) then he will make the hard choice and kill anyway (after all, sacrificing civilians to win the level is a core mechanic in the game.)

See my initial “cold resistance should be taken as seriously as heat resistance” for the rest of the this matchup, Yomi shows no cold resistance and likely might be incapacitated by the flash freeze alone. See the featposts in my first response for why the mech can win anyway even without it, because I don’t have the space to type it again here. Shield spam and repair spam + esoterics Yomi has never shown resistance to will win out the fight handedly.

Esfandiyār vs Ralph

• Esfandiyār does not even tank the blizzard. He cowers in a cave and begs god for help.
• Cowering in a cave while “food is running out” implies that he cannot resist the cold, or is adverse to it for some reason
• Praying to god takes time, he can’t just instantly think “lmao god get me out of this ice” and get the ice away, there are rituals and incantations for this shit
• Is god even there? Is Esfandiyār stipped to have God somewhere up there? Can God help him across universes?

See Yomi vs Chen Rong for how the mech kills him outside of freezing. Summarized as esoterics, tank, shield, and repair spam.

Conclusion

• My opponents strategy heavily relies on guypost style filibuster rather than actually fighting my characters
• My opponent wanks his own characters to a degree, claiming that they can do things beyond what they are actually capable of (having esoteric res where there is none, praying to a god that doesn't exist, relying on a gun that makes tiny little holes in a big mech, etc) but not enough to OOT them
• My opponents team still has no freezing resistance and is not shown to have any, relying on aforementioned guyposts and “lol he breaks out” to avoid this
• Even though the mechs can just beat them anyway, with the combination of shield, tank, repair, and esoteric spam.

[u/GuyOfEvil → u/Elick320]

Third Response

Diagetic Gameplay

It occurred to me that judges may also not know the meaning of the word, it's just that if things we perceive to be happening in a work of fiction are literal or not. For instance, the soundtrack of a movie is usually non-diagetic. The way in many video games characters are bullet sponges in game but die to just one is an instance where their durability is non-diagetic.

So in the end my opponent determines that gameplay is not literal after all, and attempts to take the mountain busting over the instant freezing.

I'll first address the argument he makes in favor of the speed of the freezing projectile. He attempts to compare the speed of the freezing to the speed of real world projectiles that exist in game. Before I could even take a crack at this argument my opponent countered it beautifully by pointing out that many in game weapon names are not literal.. This seems to be supported by the fact that the allegedly Mach 5 projectile is obviously visually extremely slow. There is still no established speed for the ice generators.

But there is still a far deeper problem with the fact that my opponent's characters exist entirely in a medium both sides of this debate agree to be non-literal. My opponent tries to sidestep this by talking about authorial intent being garbage, but his argument is really missing the actual point.

It has been agreed upon by both sides that what is happening in Into The Breach gameplay is not literal and is instead being heavily altered for the sake of the player's enjoyment and understanding. If the mountains were literally mountain sized the game would be unplayable. If the speed of every attack was exactly accurate to science the game would take forever, and this would compromise entire systems for no reason. Both of these things have been clearly altered for gameplay purposes.

With this being true, how can my opponent prove that every attack literally busts a mountain in two strikes? What if a mech is intended to do so over a much longer timeframe but the devs decided not to show that? Once it is accepted that gameplay is not literal, and make no mistake, it has been proven to not be literal, then it cannot be said that anything shown by my opponent happens as seen on screen. His characters have no provably true feats.

My opponent ends this whole argumentative line by asking for the correct interpretation, and saying that he has the evidence and I don't.. This is literally not even close to true. Both sides of this debate agree that the gameplay of Into The Breach is not literal. This is a fact in this debate. My opponent is claiming to have a "valid interpretation" that does not even exist.

With several key aspects of Into The Breach's gameplay called into question, it is extremely clear that what is shown in gameplay is not literal. Because of this, unless there is sufficient evidence to assume something shown in-game is literally happening, no feat of my opponent's characters should be assumed to have literally have happened. He has provided no such evidence for literally any claim he has made. Therefore his characters have no arguable feats, and therefore no hope of winning this round.

If you want to try and be fair here and go "well it's clear that some stuff isn't literal but that feels kinda unfair im willing to buy the mountain stuff" Keep in mind that what we both agree isn't literal is the sizes and speeds of everything shown in gameplay. If things those big are agreed on to not be literal, nothing else should be either.

Composites

I've seen enough.

In-Character Behavior

Turn-Based

I think my opponent reveals the principle disconnect between what I'm arguing in this argument and what he thinks I'm arguing in this argument in a later point he makes in his third response about freezing.

In a speed equalized environment, actions are taken one at a time. Punching yourself out of a block of ice is an action, activating the ice generator is an action. Shooting the mech is an action, the mech bombing the shit out of the enemy after it breaks out is an action, if it even can break out.

I'm not arguing that his characters are so slow they can only take one action at a time, what I'm arguing here is that in-character, his characters will do one action, then wait for my characters to take one action, then take one more action, then wait. It's not a function of speed to take two actions sequentially, it's a function of behavior.

This idea of "actions one at a time" is not true besides. I'm sure my opponent was bullied in middle school for not being able to pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time, so he should know that people can take more than one action at once. And besides different actions can take different amounts of time. Even at speed equalized throwing a punch is a lot faster than overhead swinging an axe.

My opponent's argument fundamentally misses like, how people move and act in any situation. So, while he likely could've just made a logical appeal like "my characters arent dumb they'll behave like humans and not video game constructs in a turn based game" and that could've been enough here, he makes no such argument. So don't be persuaded by making that argument in your own head.

And since he also agrees with me that his team will take the decidedly turn based construct like behavior of "never dodging attacks," there is really, honestly, not a good reason to assume his characters won't act and then wait for mine to act, while all of my characters act both while his characters are acting and while they are waiting. This is a massive, insurmountable advantage for my opponent's team.

In-Character Behavior

My opponent makes no actual argument here, he just kind of talks about how my characters would behave in-character. So, let me restate what I said in the first response about this point.

For my opponent to win he will have to prove that his team wins a majority of engagements while engaging with a majority of options, "my team can win with this one specific strategy I can't prove they'll go for more than 1/[1]00 fights" isn't a win condition for my opponent.

He hasn't done so. He has provided no meaningful evidence that his characters will use the ice spam strategy, and has put forth literally 0 argumentation that any other weapon or strategy his characters use will be able to effectively defeat mine.

In an attempt to overcome this argument, he makes some arguments about how my characters will act that seem more like fake arguments to show how absurd I'm being than real arguments, but they are also the entirety of his rebuttal to this point. So, I will quickly dismiss them.

Even when trying to put up intentionally absurd standards Space Racer gets by fine.

For Yomi and Esfandiyār, I am generally arguing they will strike their opponent a lot which will eventually kill them. This is what they have done in essentially every fight they have been in, and there is zero reason to assume they wouldn't do it.

For both of my characters, he offers that they might think his characters are statues and not attack them. This is just like on its face dumb, but also the rules say "Every combatant starts each round being 'teleported' into the arena, knowing full well whomever they face down needs to die or be incapacitated in order for they themselves to advance and win and will do so" Which pretty heavily implies that the combatants like, know who they're facing down.

I also just want to specifically point out, the quote my opponent uses from the YYH wiki about Yomi is never mentioned in the manga, and is likely taking information from the anime. The fights between Yusuke and Yomi in the anime and manga are completely different (for instance, the fight is shown in the anime), and I am not running manga Yomi. The information here is not actually relevant to this round.

I would also say the whole "how do you know they'll open with a mountain busting attack" thing is a pretty crazy claim to make without evidence. Yomi and Esfandiyār know that they are in a serious fight, and neither have been shown to hold back in a serious fight with the exception of Yomi fighting against his son. Mechas are not his son, and he will therefore probably not hold back against them.

The difference between me and my opponent here is that I am arguing my characters will, from their small set of strategies, use the ones they use in every fight they've ever been in to overcome the enemy.

My opponent is arguing that his characters, fighting against a kind of enemy they have literally never fought before in a situation they have no experience fighting in (Into The Breach's gameplay involves defending civilian targets against large insect attackers), will all use one specific strategy out of a massive list of offensive, defensive, and utility options they have access to, and will do so in a timely manner.

We are not the same.

[u/GuyOfEvil → u/GuyOfEvil]

Freezing as a Win Condition

To buy freezing my team as a win condition you must buy that

• Freezing works at all like it looks like it does in game, this has been called heavily into question.

• All three members of his team, out of the plurality of options, will choose to pursue freezing as a win condition, and will do so almost instantly

• That even if both of those things are true, freezing even does anything.

My opponent brings up a whole thing about "actions" in a speed equalized environment, and how freezing gives him a huge advantage in the action economy department, but actually reading this argument you can see how absurd his notions of "actions are" He compares "Shooting the mech" and "the mech bombing the shit out of the enemy" as "actions" that would take the same amount of time. It should be extremely obvious why firing a gun once and dropping a multitude of bombs wouldn't take the same amount of time.

Freezing as a win condition is totally ridiculous when my team can just flex their mountain busting muscles and instantly break out of the ice. They could do so before an enemy could even attack, and even if they can't the act of attacking breaks the ice anyways. It only makes sense if you assume every fixed action takes the same amount of time.

In his third response my opponent brings up that there would be a damage aspect to the freezing, but this is pretty clearly untrue when there is explicitly no damaging element to the freezing in-game. If this was actual pure cold it probably wouldn't create ice at all, just severely brittleize anything it touched. But it can be said for certain that ice attacks do not do damage in Into The Breach, so there's no reason to assume they would do damage here.

And as for a final point on ring out, the ruleset on round 1 and the ruleset in sign-ups aren't actually in conflict. The dome could still be exited by means such as teleportation.

So my opponent's literal only win condition is, still, complete and total dogwater.

General Discussion of Tanks, Shields, and Repairing as a not lose condition

This is also heavily based on my opponent's conception of "an action." Which doesn't actually make any sense. We have 0 idea how long a turn in Into The Breach is, and as such no idea how long it takes for a mech to repair itself, or how long it takes for a mech to spawn a shield, or how long it takes for a shield to be applied to a mech.

And even if the answers to all of these questions was "fast enough to be relevant" it barely matters. The shields soak one hit, and Yomi and Esfandiyār can super easily just like, punch and then follow up with their other hand. This is a ton of vague work for something that is barely relevant.

Also critical here is that the mechs can take no more than 10 shieldless hits. Meanwhile Yomi and Esfandiyār can fight extended bouts that have way more than 10 strikes against other in-tier characters. 10 is a miniscule number here and will be insanely easy to blow through.

[u/GuyOfEvil → u/GuyOfEvil]

Space Racer vs Abe

Does Killing the Pilot Kill the Mech

In my last response I asked my opponent if the A.I can take over for the mech mid combat, and his response was basically just "well, there's no evidence, but let's make a liberal interpretation and say that it can". So he literally just doesn't have an argument here. He tries to present the choice as a binary where his answer makes sense and the alternative doesn't, but it's not a binary, what if there is just never a situation in-game where the pilot would die before the mech?

There is literally no evidence that the A.I can take over for a dead pilot and my opponent admits it, I clearly win this argument.

And even if he can't find the pilot, the mech has a small, thin, human torso sized midsection. 1-2 shots to that would very obviously cause the entire mech to collapse in half. The fact that they're never taken out like this in game is irrelevant, they're not fighting something that could.

Quickdraw

My opponent basically just says "what if Space Racer decides not to shoot," But again, the argument here is that Abe has to pick a single strategy out of a huge multitude of options, and potentially will also have to figure out the controls of his own mech so that he can enact that strategy. Space Racer has to pull out his one option of attack and fire it at a weak spot. It is absurd to say that the decision making process here is not absurdly easier for Space Racer.

So Space Racer has one single vector of attack which can very easily win him the round, and Abe has to pick between a multitude of options that may or may not be all that effective. Space Racer clearly wins this fight the vast majority of the time.

Yomi vs Chen Rong

Basically nothing to add here. Yomi can easily just project his ki to break out of ice near instantly, he can either just use his barrier to defend against esoterics, or dodge them because they're going to be at most Mach 5 and he has Mach 12 reaction times.

Also note that Yomi's attacks, like Yusuke, will likely have area of effect results regardless of what he's doing, so any tanks will be destroyed in the crossfire of anything he does.

Yomi can counter my opponent's primary win condition extremely easily, can counter his secondary win conditions with his barrier, and has the stamina to easily box out the mech. He wins this fight free.

Esfandiyār vs Ralph

My opponent is misreading this passage, "leader and solder" refers to those things in general, Esfandiyār and his men brave the elements with "heads exposed" So either they stopped cowering to pray and were fine, or were never cowering. The second telling of this story makes it clearer, where it describes the snow as having vanished from "underneath his feet". He clearly does actually have the cold resistance to manage a blizzard that made the earth desolate.

My opponent asks if praying to God will take time, which it doesn't really seem like it does when Rostam does it, and another instance where He seems to respond pretty fast, or at least right as Rostam is in need. So this shouldn't be an issue.

My opponent lastly asks if God is even there. This round takes place in real world Rome, where God exists. Here are 5 arguments proving as much. My opponent cant counter these because its third response

And even if that doesn't work, as I've already established freezing isn't an actual win con, and Esfandiyār has the extremely easy, uncountered win con of just picking up the mech and putting it upside-down, where it wouldn't be able to get back up. My opponent never actually countered this win-con because he was too focused on freezing.

Esfandiyār wins this fight easily.

Conclusion

If you believe that

• Anything happening in Into The Breach gameplay is literal, despite neither me nor my opponent thinking that

• His characters won't act in a turn based manner

• My opponent's characters will fight using only the two specific strategies he outlines (freezing and shield spam) despite my opponent having no evidence outside of single paragraph descriptions of his team's jobs before piloting mechs

• That freezing is even remotely viable as a win-condition

• That if freezing isn't, shields will be enough to supplement the pitiful amount of in-tier attacks the opposition can take despite us having no idea how long anything involved in their use takes

Then you can actually consider who wins any given 1v1, in which

• Space Racer can kill the pilot or destroy the mech's midsection and win in 1-2 shots

• Yomi can use his barrier to block any incoming attack and just box the mech out

• Esfandiyar can just pick up the mech and put it down on its head, barring that, he can just box it out

Outside of freezing, my opponent has no stated win-cons for any of these matches outside of "some esoterics." He has all of his eggs in the freezing basket, and it's a terrible basket to be in. Meanwhile my team all has obvious, easy to execute win conditions in every given match. I am the clear winner in this debate.