Good Elimination Srategy!
 

Ok sooooooooooooo, the key strategy to winning elimination is for the first minute and a half (dependent on how long it takes you to get on the bridge) just shoot and score as many goals as you can. Then get your alliance to figure out how to triple balance (suggestion: practice field.) Time after time the alliance that won waterford continually triplpe balanced and beat the other team no matter how many points the other team shot...

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

So you're saying that the way to win is: Shoot balls better than other people, then balance! How shocking.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

So let me check this.
We should score alot of balls in hybrid and teleop.
And we should try to get as many robots balanced on the bridge as possible.
Sounds pretty good to me!

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

The defense is playing wrong if you can pull off a triple balance.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

What if you are trying to triple balance from within your own lane? How could that be defended against?

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

If you send one bot to play one on one with one of their bots, you can block them from getting on the bridge or crossing the bump. If you can push, then t-bone them until they run out of time. It's not a pin unless they're touching a field element.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

This may be called under as blocking the flow of the game, but an alliance can have one robot sit by the bridge opposite of the lane, and have one robot guarding the center of the field to stop robots from reaching their lane. The key is a danger area for the alliance trying to get in the lane limiting the zone needed to be defended.

I don't know how practical this defense is but it is technically possible.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

It works really well, especially if one of your alliance partners manages to flip and block your lane. I don't know when you cross the line between blocking balancing and good clean defense, but 2068 played that on us really effectively. They could have won the match if they kept it up.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

I believe the gdc clarified last year at championships that blocking the flow of the game is when two or more robots work together to prevent robots from getting across though I do not know if that is the case this year.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

There is a good point to be made here still, figuring out the fastest and best way to triple balance is not as trivial as it looks. You have to be aware of which robots can hang off the ends of the ramp, and which have the power to push the rest of the team up the ramp if needed. Look at Oregon, 3711 was a 4 wheel drive robot with a large wheel base. This means 2 things: 1. they can hang off the end of the bridge, 2. they will high center if they attempt to go last up the bridge and possibly be flipped. In practice what this means is that when you watch the videos you'll notice that in every triple balance 3711 goes up first, the bridge goes all the way over and rests on the opposite side, then 360 crawled up the other side until the bridge fell back to rest balanced. It took multiple practice attempts in the pits before the alliance could pull off a triple balance in every win through eliminations.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

Another strategy that the winning alliance used at the Rutgers District was to have their best shooter stay in the key and have their second best bot feed them balls, and just have the third bot play defense.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

I think what my teammate is trying to say is that the bridges play the biggest role in the qualification matches, but in the elimination rounds it's all about making shots.

470, 3620, and 1025 were the only alliance to prevent the HOT, Las G. and Crev alliance from triple balancing at Waterford, but we still lost because we couldn't put up the number of shots they were while we were playing defense.

When it comes down to it, in the elims, you score as much as you can as fast as you can, balance and just forget about the other alliance. If you're max points weren't enough to beat them then so be it, but playing defense is pointless in elims.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

I'm not really sure why you think playing defense is pointless in elims...

I'd contest that defense is far from pointless in either elims or quals, but I'll just focus on elims.

I guess part of a disagreement could result from how defense is defined... I'd say it's any actions you take to make scoring harder on the opposite alliance. This year, I think of moving balls from their zone to yours, blocking their path to their scoring location, blocking/reducing their ball supply, preventing them from getting to their bridge, etc.

When winning the match is the dominating motive, the question on whether or not to play defense is "can we inhibit them from scoring more than we could score if we weren't defending them?" - if the answer is "yes," play defense! Given that this year three robots can't all score from the near zone without slowing each other down some (due to space and ball supply constraints), you will usually find that you want at least one of your robots to not be scoring balls from the near zone.

So, what do these other robot(s) do? Well, they can indirectly assist with scoring balls (feed from near/far zone, keep opposing defenders away), they can assist with scoring bridge points, or they can play defense. Given that there isn't a whole lot you can do to aid with balancing for at least the first 60-80 seconds of the match, they should assist with scoring or play defense...

This is where it all starts coming down to the skills of those not scoring balls... Perhaps they're really great at harvesting and passing balls... Quite likely by picking up balls from the far zone and shooting (or ferrying) them over, they could have more of an impact than if they were playing a different type of defense. Alternatively, there may be a robot harassing your top scorer... Your partner may have more of an impact by keeping that defender off than by playing defense on the opposing scorers. There certainly are some robots that are exceptionally good defenders through a combination of strategy, robot capability, and smooth driving.

It usually only occurs on a very deep field that all three of your robots at all points in the match can do more by scoring than by playing defense... and even then it's far from always the case! Really, whether to play defense or not is a case-by-case decision; however, there certainly do exist alliances that may not be benefited by playing defense and alliances that can benefit tremendously from it.

Re: Good Elimination Srategy!
 

When watching the Chesapeake competition, I saw two types of defence- playing straight defence against teams, pushing them around, attempting to block them from getting to the bridge, etc, etc, was not very effective.

On the other hand, I also saw team 2534 playing defence very effectively. They went over the bump almost immediately and started shooting every ball they could back to the other side. With their long range shooter, they even made a couple shots from that distance. But that ball deprivation strategy allowed them to pull off a couple wins that I would not have expected them to get otherwise. I think that this kind of strategy could be very effective in elims.