Transformers: Guardian Robots not so hot?

[Cynical Cat]

Guardian Robots are big and tough, depending on continuity the enforcers of the Quintessons, Shockwave, and the Autobots. A few of them even have sparks. Despite how powerful they appear to be, they are unable to win the wars for the sides they champion. They are virtually extinct by the end of the Autobot-Decepticon War, in some continuities having failed to prevail even when the other side didn't have gestalts of their own, and they fail to prevent the success of the Cybertronian revolt against their Quintesson masters.

So obviously, having them doesn't guarrantee victory. In fact, odds are your side is going to lose if you field them. A few possibilities I have considered on the subject of why they aren't so hot..

1) They are non-sentient. Gestalts tend to be simple in their combined form, but they are still smarter than Guardians. This means they are comparatively easy to lead into traps that can hurt them and react poorly to situations they aren't programmed to handle.

2) They're big and can't break up into smaller units. This makes them resource hogs and as the war grinds both sides down, their cost/benefit ratio isn't good enough to build more of them.

3) Most of the Decepticon heavy hitters have weapons with huge firepower. Megatron and Shockwave owe/reinforce their leadership positions in part by packing enough firepower to lay a hurting on a Guardian.

4) Transformer durability is fairly variable from appearance to appearance. Devestator gets punked by Prime in his first appearance. In others he bounces fire off his chest. Talking about their toughness should keep that in mind. But if we take a position sort of halfway between them in between the extremes, then Guardians are well armoured over most of their bodies, but some areas like their optics and joints aren't as tough. Guardians are big, slow targets. If it takes enough fire, some is going to hit in a place that will hurt it badly. And then the wolves circle and pull it down.

Thoughts? Critiques? Alternate opinions?

[frigidmagi]

I would suggest their main value lay in the amount of attention and firepower they soaked up. The Autobots were certainly overly dependent on them in the opening stages of the wars. They paid heavily for that.

Never send drones to fight a sapient's war.

[Dark Silver]

The Dark Guardians (as they were called) during the Quintessons rule of Cybertron were very effective for what they were doing, until Alpha Trion managed to make a remote which over-rode the Quint's control of them (the Coda Remote) thus making them ineffective for stopping the Rebellion.

After the Autobots had control of Cybertron, and Megatron started his War, the Autobots simply focused to much on letting the Guardian Robots do the brunt of the fighting. Quiet simply, the Guardian Robots are designed as a massive police force or national guard, even more so as a blunt instrument to quell a rebellion rather than general army practices.

Aside from the Unarmored head unit and the joints proper, the bulk of the robot is very resistant to damage, and only truly powerful Transformers can really put a dent in them.

Of the known Guardian Robots, only Omega Supreme ever had a Spark, though some have a developed enough A.I. (the Dreamwave-verse's Omega Sentinel for example) to fool you into thinking they had one.

[Cynical Cat]

The Dark Guardians (as they were called) during the Quintessons rule of Cybertron were very effective for what they were doing, until Alpha Trion managed to make a remote which over-rode the Quint's control of them (the Coda Remote) thus making them ineffective for stopping the Rebellion.

Time to repeat frigid's line about using drones. :D

After the Autobots had control of Cybertron, and Megatron started his War, the Autobots simply focused to much on letting the Guardian Robots do the brunt of the fighting. Quiet simply, the Guardian Robots are designed as a massive police force or national guard, even more so as a blunt instrument to quell a rebellion rather than general army practices.

They may have been designed to quell rebellion, but they sucked at it. The completely failed to supress Megatron's rebellion, despite the suppositions below about their general toughness.

Aside from the Unarmored head unit and the joints proper, the bulk of the robot is very resistant to damage, and only truly powerful Transformers can really put a dent in them.

Clearly the Decepticons were able to destroy large numbers of them. Their size and presumable thickness of their armour is consistent with them being hard to kill with ordinary weapons. Presumbaly a combination of massed firepower, specialty weapons (like loading Seekers with a few really big missiles), heavy hitters like Megatron and Shockwave, and targeting vulnerable areas was sufficient to end them even with the aid of warrior Autobots.

There is another possible solution to the Guardian problem, that of specialized big "giant killer" weapon systems. I find the possibility of wide use unlikely, as such weapons are never deployed against Guardians or gestalts to the best of my knowledge.

[Dark Silver]

Well, obviously eventually the Guardians were useless, but there's little doubt to their effectiveness (even in their limited reign). Thundercracker and Skywarp even state how often they had flee the battlefield due to just one of the Guardian's being present.

That's not saying without the proper weaponry, they couldn't be beaten, heavy hitters like Shockwave and Megatron, and the Gestault Warriors (Devestator in particular) could easily turn the tide. hell, Devestator itself was a match for possibly the strongest of the Guardian robots, Omega Supreme himself.


But against "standard issue" weapons and the normal run of the mill Cybertronian, the Guardians where a threat you didn't want to see on the battlefield.

Much like frigid pointed out, even if they were ineffective at stopping a revolt, even a single Guardian on the field will soak up a significant amount of firepower as they try to stop it's advance, thus letting the smaller sentiant 'bots move on ahead.

[Cynical Cat]

That generally seems consistent. Their appearance did scare the hell of the nameless shmuck minion Decepticons in the time travel episode. It probably took a lot of shots from the standard "big pistol" transformer gun to do any signifigant damage to that armour.