Re: Championship Strategies
 

Haha. We're working on it. No guarantees yet though. We might be able to get a 7 or 5 disk working in a week though. ;)

Re: Championship Strategies
 

While I think defensive robots are useful at the regional level, I doubt that they are going to be useful enough at champs to be worth considering. I think if a defensive robot makes it onto Einstein it's going to need be effective against cycle shooters as well. The alliances are probably going to be composed of two cycle shooters and a full court.

Re: Championship Strategies
 

That doesn't mean that they can't climb for 30 though, there's a lot of teams that will be doing things at champs that we haven't seen yet.

This is exactly what I was thinking, I would bet that most of the alliances if not all of them will have one feeder station bot doing laps and one ground pick-up.

Re: Championship Strategies
 

Challenge accepted ;)

We've found a few tricks for slowing down 2 opposing pyramid cyclers...on one occasion helping to upset an alliance that had two awesome teams that are on the FRC Top 25. In the two regionals we've won this year we were allied with a pyramid cycler, a full court shooter, and us playing defense. I think that would be our ideal combo, but I'm curious to see the dynamics of other combinations as well.

Re: Championship Strategies
 

A little story:

A few years ago (2006), there was a bet between a mentor of 1114 and a mentor of 148 (or was JVN still on 229?). The bet regarded the makeup of the Einstein winner--3x offense, or 2x offense and 1x defense (with defense defined as scoring under 10 points, I think per match but it's been a while).

JVN went offense, and after the "defender" scored the fourth shot in the Aim High high goal, collected. Now, in spirit, he did not win--the defender did spend a lot of the time playing defense--but under the terms of the bet, he won fair and square, with the entire CD community as a witness.

All that to say: There will be defenders on Einstein. I will guarantee that. However, I will NEVER be so oblivious as to say that defense is all they do; they WILL score points in their own right, and quite a few of them. The defense may be opportunistic rather than strategized, and may be even more effective that way. A defensive robot on Einstein will always be able to rack up points if called on to do so, unless the game is best played with a purely defensive robot on the alliance.

Re: Championship Strategies
 

I think that a lot of people are jumping to the defensive bot thinking way too quickly. Every year since I can remember the winning alliance has consisted of 2 powerhouse scorers and one very niche robot that didn't develop its goal until the championships. This robot also always happens to be at least a regional powerhouse that by some miracle falls through the alliance selections to the 21-24th pick.

I think that the championships will be the alliance that builds a brilliant game plan and executes it. The best robots don't win, the best alliances do. For instance, this year you can't exactly take scoring objects from your opponents (16, 4334 last year), but you can still manage them in unique ways, floor pickup defensive robot that steals the other alliances misses and shoots them over for another floor pickup to use maybe? I think that as always Einstein will be won on the alliance selection field, if the teams out there let that niche team fall to the late second round and get picked up by the high scoring duo that's looking for them then it's game over. As to what that strategy may be I have some ideas.

*All alliances must have at least one robot capable of a 7 disc auto*

1. FCS
2. Cycle
3. Floor pickup defensive
The third pick is the rarest and luckiest to get, for the first minute the cylcer and the FCS pound away at the 3 point goal until they run out of frisbees, the cycler or the FCS then must have a full court shooter and proceed to clean up all the misses with the defensive floor pickup, while the other rushes to play defense on the other alliance.

1. Cycle
2. Cycle
3. Cycle
It's crazy, but if one of those has a 7 disc auto and another a 30 point climb and dump, it wouldn't be hard to imagine this alliance draining a feeder station and putting up scores over 200 every time they hit the field.

I still expect a niche to develop at championship that we have yet to see, but if past years are any indication, I wouldn't be surprised if Spam-Filter climbers are that niche, tall enough to block an FCS, a decent driver, a 30 point climb, a good auto, and that's one deadly 3rd pick for a high ranked team, because every alliance will need a way to deal with FCS's, I don't expect some of the more high profile robots of that genre (148, 180, 67, 469, etc.) to be missing much of the 3 pointers by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around.