Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

We climbed and dumped in every one of our elimination rounds. We also had a three to four disc autonomous in those rounds. It still wasn't enough and we got eliminated in the semi-finals. When you are up against two solid shooters and a good defender it is hard to beat unless your teammates are fast and amazingly accurate.

Another part is that the game pieces are consistent, but not o
100%. We only got all four discs in auto once. Sometimes we only got two. Those twelve points make or break the game.

You could also argue that the game isn't named right, I would have called it "ultimate frisbee shooting, and maybe climb that big tower if you want a good engineering challenge but are okay with losing from time to time"

That doesn't have the same ring to it as "Ultimate Ascent" though does it?

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

The only consistent climber/dumper I have witnessed so far is 4451 Bobotz Garage who was really good at it. They seeded high and always got to the top of the tower easily and dumped four discs every time. Thier only weakness was they didn't retract the dumper to some discs would touch against it and those points were disallowed. They seeded well and should have won Orlando. 340 would have done well at it but their shooter jammed often. I suspect this will be fixed by Buckeye.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

Care to explain this one? We had 3 shooters against 125 (233 wasn't shooting). This seems to be exactly the situation Jonathan and I have both explained. Their defender simply wasn't up to the task of playing good (clean) defense and didn't neutralize enough of our scoring in an appropriate manner.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

I'm sorry but no. Pink greatly diminished your alliances scoring capability in those finals matches. The reason you guys won was because 4451/125/233 only could score 3 high goal and 2 low goal in auto, whereas, your alliance could score 9 in the high goal. That amount of point difference was just too much to overcome.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

so from what it sounds like even if you can climb it would be better to spend your time doing defense and shooting?

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

I think you need to read a little more into people's statements rather than looking for an easy answer.

It is a fairly simple mathematical equation that comes doing to points / second.

Can your climber/dumper, plus 1 average shooter and a defender, beat 2 average shooters and a defender?

Score (climber) + Score (Shooter) = Score (Shooter) + Score (Shooter).

50 (climber) + 36 (teleop shooter) + 12 (auton shooter) != 36 (teleop shooter) + 12 (auton shooter) + 36 (teleop shooter) + 12 (auton shooter)

Or,

Climbing Team = 50+36+12 = 98
Shooting Team = 36+12+36+12 = 96 , at a very very rough first estimation.

Edit: Corrected. The first approximation appears they are very close.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

The reason they lost is because they COULDN"T consistently score 3 high goals and 2 low goals in Auto.

First game Blue (4451) scored 28 in Auto and won it 109 to 81.

2nd game only 4 in auto and they lost by 2, 95-97.

3rd game 10 in auto and they lost 82 to 103 thanks to 23 penalty points.

Blue outscored Red in Teleop (Blue 41-41-32 vs Red 31-41-30) and Hanging (Blue 40-50-40 vs Red 20-20-20) every game.

Blue's inconsistent Auto (Blue 28-4-10 vs Red 30-36-30) is what cost them the win. It should have never went to a third game, ONE high goal in Auto by Blue would have ended it at the second game.

But that's why you play the game!

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

I thought the 125 alliance would take it also. But I think 4451 would be more effective if they played some D in the first 30 seconds before they climb, although that puts them at risk. The 744/79/1772 Alliance played a dynamic D and O strategy that was just the right balance to slow down the 125 alliance. The 2 penalties at the end were unfortunate but that's the risk 233 was taking (and yes we should have picked em...)

I think a climber dumper that plays D at nationals could be huge when there are plenty of shooters to choose from. Reason is they get out of the way giving room for the shooters to work.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

We had the same thoughts. It was a tough choice to not pick Pink.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

233 diminished OUR ability to score due to our hopper breaking finals 1. ;) We had almost 0 scoring ability left.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

As I was headed out to the picking I asked Andy if he had it all together and he said no, don't pick us.... But I knew they were gonna bring the D. It's becoming the 233 curse for us.

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

We missed all 3 of our auto shots this match, the first of any auto shots we missed all weekend....

However, I feel like I should step in here. The #8 alliance WON the regional. There is no point in hashing out what could have happened or what should have happened. They are your Orlando Regional Champs, and we have a ton of respect for them doing so from the #8 seed.

Theres no point in discussing what would happen if so and so didn't get a penalty, or so and so made a few more shots, because it didn't happen and thats why the matches are played. Both alliances had an opportunity to win, and the #8 alliance seized theirs and thats all there is to it.


Major props to 744/79/1772, you guys earned your banner.

-Brando

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

We're running into the same problem. Our best non-climb score is 60 (3 disc auto and 4 cycles with 2 misses). If we climb immediately, our best-case differential isn't real impressive (+8 over our actual non-climb, +2 over best case non-climb).

I think the discrepancy isn't so much the name "Ultimate Ascent", but that the "good engineering challenge" was mis-defined by a lot of teams--by my limited knowledge, basically everyone except 1114. It's not "climb the pyramid and dump the discs", it's "score a lot, then climb the pyramid and dump when your opponent [albeit alliance dependent] can only score 50 more points". So we knew we wanted to climb fast, but we had no idea it needed to be that fast. No we're aiming for 2 feeder loads before we climb. (We certainly technical have capacity to pull it off, not that it's not a lot of work to prep and get reliable.)

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

I would say a lot of it comes down to the game that 50 point climber/dumpers are designed to play. This thread has already pointed out that a dedicated dumper is capped with a max score of around 50 points per match. That's better than the average robot score but is a far cry from the 70+ that many primary scorers can put up on Championship alliances at the regional level (consider further that almost none of the dumpers have 100% consistency, which puts their average score below 50).

An alliance relying on a dumper as one of its primary scorers isn't likely to win a shootout because of the cap on scoring that the dumper has. If an alliance is built primarily around a dumper bot the only way they're going to win IMO is by going all out on defense (similar to the triple balance alliances at the regional level last year). Keeping the disc scores low for the opposing alliance makes the 50 point dump worth more relative to their score and could be a winner when combined with some decent autonomous scores and 10 point hangs from the other alliance members. Since the majority of the dumpers take half the match (or more) to load and score the rest of the alliance is left in a 2v3 situation which makes playing all out defense that much tougher. They probably will score hardly any teleop discs because they won't be able to do anything other than try to stop the opposing alliance from scoring. The biggest issue facing this strategy is autonomous scoring because the alliance will probably cap out around 100 points maximum. If the opposing alliance has a 5 or 7 disk autonomous and racks up 70+ points when you can't defend them then the match is already over.

I do hope that dumpers are a part of some of the championship alliances as 2nd round picks at the Championship (or deep events like the district championships). At a deep event most of the 1st round picks are going to be high scoring disc machines, if the dumpers don't end up as a lower seeded alliance captain they could make a very valuable 3rd partner to an alliance wanting to go all out on offense. Could you imagine the scores from an alliance of 2056, 987, and a 50 point dumper?

Re: Climbing and dumping not winning?
 

so if your robot can climb, dump, and shoot. how fast would your climber have to be to make it worth climbing and dumping?