How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

What will the alliance captains pick for their team ?
I think that 42 point stackers will rise to be the high alliance captains.
If this is so then Alliance #1 will also pick a high point stacking team.
If they do not pick a score team and go for a can grabbing ( off step) robot they may get most of the cans with no efficient way to score them. Then their 3rd pick would be a low scoring robot.
Then alliance #2 to #8 must match what alliance #1 picks. If this is true then teams that are can grabbers maybe be picked by lower alliances. This will be fun to watch what teams do alliance selections.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

I think the "perfect" alliance will consist of a robot (or two) the claim the RC from the center in auto. One robot would be dedicated to landfill totes, another to stacking RCs on 6-tote stacks, and the final robot would focus on chute door (yes, chute door). When landfill and RC stacker finish, they'll score what's left of the human player totes. Alliance captains would pick teams that compliment them, having priority over RC claiming, landfill, and then chute door in that order.

As we have only seen week 0, I'm sure this will change, that those are my thoughts on alliance strategy.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

The same way they always do - select seams so the alliance is most likely to win the event. This always means to pick high scorers. This year there is no defense. Among the high scorers, the key is going to be how well robots complement each other. That is, each of the following three robots' teams would be more likely to select each other than another robot like themselves:

• a tote-flipping landfill miner
• a fast, strong RC snatcher
• a fast, efficient HP station loader

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

The way our team discussed this problem at the beginning of the year was different because of the new way the playoffs are held. With the top four teams in the quarterfinals and top 2 from the semifinals advancing, then alliances that maximize their own scoring while limiting the scoring of as many other alliances as they can, would be the ones to advance. With this in mind, the RC's on the step are the most important part to this strategy.

With only the three RC's that start on an alliances side of the field, if they stacked all their totes (including those from the step) and the 3 RC's they own, they would score 212 points (I'm not including noodles in any points, as it is all dependent on both alliances use of them). So this alliances max score would be 212 (plus autonomous and noodles).

The other alliance, if they had taken all 4 RC's from the step, would have a max score of 284 in teleop (everything stacked) plus autonomous and noodles.

The difference may not seem like a large gap in terms of FIRST games, but when you think about the time and ability it would take to score everything on your side of the field, it would take three extremely efficient teams to pull this off.

My point is that the RC's being taken off the step can make or break an alliance's run in the playoffs.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

Agreed that this is probably the hardest and most important bit. But either the snatcher or the alliance partners must be able to score them for best effect - so be ready to place them yourself or reorient them as needed!

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

I think it depends on how strong teams at the regional are. For the standard regional, I see a human player station specialist picking a landfill robot and then for their third bot a second human player station robot. If either of the robots has a container auto or can get containers from the step in tele, it's really just icing on the cake. However, that robot will need to be able to score on its own to be useful or will be on a lower alliance that needs to take the risk. For championships, a perfect alliance i see is a human player station robot, a landfill specialist that can grab to containers in auto and a recycling container/human player station specialist that can grab containers in auto. I say 2 auto container robots because I think tug of wars and races will make having two separate robots on each side getting containers more reliable than just one robot doing all four. Unless of course a single team already has two separate bots tethered together to get containers.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

In my opinion, the following will be the ideal alliance composition.

The alliance captain would be an efficient tote stacker via the human player station (as that seems to be fastest) and will also be able to stack recycling bins to some degree of effectiveness. Their match points average would probably be around 72 points (2 full stacks, a minute per stack, meaning they could do roughly 5 seconds per tote, and 12 seconds for the bin, leaving 18 seconds to stack the stack)

Their first pick would ideally be someone who could pick from the landfill, probably a dual grabber. This person would ideally average 36 points a game. They would focus on solely making the stacks, not capping them. Although they would only score 36 points, the value would be much higher as the last pick would ideally cap it.

As I said, the last robot would be an effective bin specializer. They would be able to quickly grab bins from the step, and get them loaded with noodles/stack them fast. Their points would depend on their alliance members stacking.

Without noodles, you'd then be looking at an average score of 180 points, which I assume would be spectacular.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

This is exactly what we saw at GSCR last weekend. The 4th seed alliance swept everything from Quals onward because they had this exact composistion, the only problem was that their container scorer could not retrieve from the full landfill so they rarely/never got a 4th stack capped. The landfiller got a consistant 2 stacks of 5 with a couple extra on the side, and the chute stacker got 2 stacks of 4/5 and they always capped 3 of them.

Right after alliance selection everyone in our betting pool was trying to pick them up to win.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

It is really going to depend on the competition.... If we are so fortunate as to be a captain this weekend, we'll pick the highest scoring robot (w/o coopertition) to join us - with a favoring to a robot that can deal well with tipped RC's. Why? At an early district event, we anticipate that there will be a limited number of robots that can score a lot of points. Most likely, that robot plus ours will each be able to maximize our scores. If the third robot can do anything, we'll consider it a bonus. Moreover, this would mean that that "higher scoring" bot will not be scoring against us.... At this competition, I do not anticipate the center RC's being all that important.

However, at our last district event, I anticipate teams being stronger. This will change the equation significantly. We'll only know after seeing play on the first day, but those center RC's should start to play a role, greatly increasing the value of a landfill specialist with a center RC grabber.... At our District Champs, I fully expect the equation to be changed and can see us opting for a little bit of a lesser robot with autonomous access to the center RC's... Of course, in St. Louis, each alliance will need to be able to make a strong play for the center RC's.

In other words, the higher the level of competition, the more important center RC's become (and less important the unprocessed litter)... This will change the alliance selections significantly.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

As the season progresses I could actually see litter processing become more important. At the Lake Superior and Northern Lights Regional I noticed nobody bothered processing litter until the playoffs and in particular the finals. On the Lake Superior field in the finals the blue alliance cleared one more piece of litter than the red alliance and ended up winning by a point. This could have been because of the more direct impact of the opposing alliance's score. It also could have been because teams realize that they are really evenly matched and need every advantage they can get. I think it's probably a little bit of both. Either way when teams get to the upper levels of competiton where there isn't much separating one alliance from the next I could see litter becoming that much more important.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

At higher levels, I think you are going to see more litter put into RC's and, therefore, less unprocessed litter available... I would also suggest that, as we are seeing stronger alliances, teleop scores will skyrocket (over 200), and dwarfing the maximum of 40 unprocessed litter points (28 points if three noodles are stunk into RC's)... And rarely will teams get 4 pts. for each available piece of litter - most will end up in the landfill for 1 point.... Yes, in close matches the litter will matter, but the first (and most important) battle will be over who is going to make the most stacks with the center RC's.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

Absolutely 6 is better than 4. 7 RC's means 7 noodles scored in RC.

I think RC scoring robots that also handle Landfill two at a time will be among 1st selections on alliances if they are not captains themselves. Hey that's us, what a coincidence.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

I understand what you're saying when you say 6 is better than 4. However you need to break down every action by how much time it takes. If your alliance plans to put up 200 points in Teleop like the post above mentions, that is 1.48 points/sec. If it takes your alliance 2 seconds to put a noodle into an RC you are losing a point every time you do it.

I know that not every noodle you throw is going to be a guaranteed 4 points. I'm just making the point that 6 points is not always better than 4. A human player throw takes up 0 seconds of robot time. A great human player throw can even slow down the other alliance :)

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

Maybe it would be better to think of it as 1.48 (points/sec)/robot. Since you have 3 robots, it's only .5ish points per sec. So now you have 4 seconds for it to be worth it.

Re: How will Alliance captains pick ?
 

I do like that better. (robotpoints)/sec = .5

I'm sure that the high caliber teams that are putting up 200 points as an alliance can easily justify this time. My point was just that this game is almost purely an optimization problem, and you can't forget about time when talking about it.