"Moving on. Our first opponents are crowd favorites: Meal Team 6. For the uninitiated fast food companies have a lot of advertising budget, which means Meal Team 6 is very well funded. They have some of the best pilots and best equipment every year. Their win rate hovers around 50%, and that is because this team is in it for the money. Their goal is to have a tasty looking mecha on camera and showcase their sponsor's logo. Their money comes from exciting fights drawing viewership and getting as many eyes as possible on them. They don't try and win the matches quickly because that will reduce viewership and they never look to receive too much damage to their mecha either because that will hurt their bottom line.

I want to stress, any average pilot going in not looking to win as fast as possible would get smashed fast. The only reason they can pull this off is because they hire the best talent for pilots and provide them with cutting edge machinery.

Last year, they were running a three Mecha Team.

'Double Pounder' is a melee focused mecha." Gigi said, bringing up an image of what looked like a burger with arms and legs. The arms looked rather beefy, ending in massive fists. "Don't be fooled by the appearance. The exterior is largely a carbosilicate aerogel sculpted to look burger like. They change that out each fight to look like one of their sponsor's burger. Under that they've dumped a lot of money into getting whatever the cutting edge hardware is from anyone selling. The thing is a beast in hand to hand with all that padding.

'Frylock' is built similarly. High grade components under an aerogel exterior sculpted to look like french fries. Unlike the Double Pounder which uses a battery-only layout for the relatively short duration of the fight. Frylock packs its own fusion reactor. Typically they field it with some kind of stun weaponry. ECM jammers, mecha-scale tasers, Non-nuclear EMP, that kind of thing. Really power hungry stuff. Its power to weight isn't as good as the Double Pounder so they tend to run it in the back line with a large shield. Naturally they decorate the shield with their sponsor's value menu and manage to get a good angle on it in every shot.

'Nashville Hot' has an entirely different build. The thing runs on Internal Combustion and mounts a huge tank of LOX. The build is a little nutty, generating power for the electric motors with a rocket engine, and using that rocket engine like a flame thrower to burn down opponents. The whole thing is mostly custom so no telling what parts are actually on the inside.

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Gigi would clear the display table with a wave of her hand, and bring up an image of the rules contract, "For the 2324 season, The Martian Mecha League has decided to run this tournament as a Three Game Guarantee, Single Elimination, 1v1, Gentleman's. Everyone is guaranteed at least three matches without being eliminated. Though after the first loss you're in the elimination bracket. Again, we can loose the first three matches, but after that one more loss and we're out. Or if we win the first three, then it will be two eliminations before we're out.

For those of you who aren't familiar. A gentleman's tournament allows both parties playing to make gentleman's agreements with one another. These agreements are allowed but remember that enforcement is difficult because there are no official mechanisms by the tournament organizers to ensure they are followed besides the referees of the match. Its not going to be like the security software or mandatory pilot protection systems that are highly regulated. As an example, we can Gentleman's to making the fight melee only and if any ref sees us using a gun we will be disqualified. However if we Gentleman's agreement to using a specific type of engine, the referees will not be checking our mecha so that ind of thing would be on the honor system.

The standard rules from last year are in effect. There are no budget restrictions, or weight restrictions on the mecha but martian gravity and sandy terrain will make anything above a certain weight somewhat difficult to pilot. Similarly our machine has to be 'Sufficiently Mecha' to participate. The rules committee doesn't outline what specifically that means and will make a value judgement on each case individually. They pretty much allow anything so long as it has legs so we shouldn't have to worry. We also have the usual security requirements for pilots. This includes both the mandatory armored pilot pod, AND the mandatory fire control software restrictions that will prevent direct attacks against a pilot pod. There are also restrictions on some nuclear, biological, and chemical weapon systems... the usual 'anything that sticks around for more than a few minutes'. There are also restrictions on communication, we can send voice and video but no kinds of remote piloting are allowed. Commands to operate machinery have to originate with the machine itself.

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