The Highest Levels of Play
 

How is the game going to play at the highest levels?
That's a question I always try to ask during kickoff weekend and the following weeks during build season each year. I've yet to be right.

In 2015 I believed that independent stackers and cappers could be competitive at the highest levels, and that step totes would be needed.
In 2014 I believed that trussing to a catch would be necessary at the highest levels,.
In 2013 I believed that all three robots on the winning alliance at the highest levels would need to be able to execute a 30 point climb.
In 2012 I believed that robots would be able to accurately (>50%) shoot from their protected alleys on the opposite side of the field as their goals.


I also feel that teams fail to push the game to its limitations during the championship event and IRI- either because they haven't though through the possibilities or because they realize they don't need to in order to succeed:

In 2014, I was surprised how few alliances at championships attempted death cycles, and how many opted for traditional cycles despite being at an obvious disadvantage running traditional cycles compared to their opponents.
In 2013, I was surprised how many alliances at IRI chose not to pick a robot with a climb, despite clearly needing at least one to have a shot of beating 1114, 2056, and 1334.
In 2015, I was surprised how few alliances at championships allowed fast can grabbers to fall to lower seeds and allowed 3+ stack/match robots to last until late in the draft or go unpicked.

Some games or tasks obviously are pushed to their limits: 2011 wasn't getting much better, 2015 can grabbers were unbelieveably fast, 2012 scores got exceptionally high.

How does your team determine what gameplay at the highest levels is going to look like?
How does this shape your robot design, your strategic decisions, your scouting and picklisting, etc?
Why does it feel like the games sometimes aren't pushed to their limits?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I feel that games sometimes aren't pushed to their limits because the limit is almost impossible to achieve.

EDIT: What is a death cycle?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Once we've kind of read through the rules and understood the flow of the gameplay, we do a simulation. We will go to our cafeteria, use the game pieces and similar objects, and get students to move around like robots and play a match for 2 minutes. We'll then run through a couple of specific scenarios (like timing cycle time in 2013) and kind of extrapolate those results to determine our initial bot's goals. We try to phrase things like "we need to be able to do x in y time" as goals for our build. This goes a long way in our strategy discussion. This kind of initial analysis usually sets our goals for week 1 competition, sometimes further. We essentially push our design to reach and exceed the simulation times for scoring.

As far as why we don't see games pushed to their limit: It's tough for teams, even at championships, to play synchronized with eachother to push the game to their limit. Things happen, and sometimes 3 amazing teams just don't work as well with eachother on the field, even if individually they are all amazing.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The best example is what the #8 seeded alliance in Archimedes did to upset the #1 seed in this match.

At it's core, it involves the undefendable finish strategy that 1918 used in that match, where they sat next to the low goal, received inbounds from the human player, and shot without having to move. It was quick and undefendable.

Executed perfectly, it could have been an undefendable trusser (like 900) coupled with a smart robot with a quick passback and an undefendable finisher (like 1918). A few different alliances tried variations on the strategy including:
Archimedes 8th Seed: 51-2485-1918-781,
Archimedes 6th Seed: 4077-195-20-4265,
IRI #2 Seed (only the finish): 2056-469-1625-4039

Heck, we even tried it in a match with your team at IRI in qualifications and nearly beat a deadly alliance.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

A death cycle in 2014 referred to a cycle that was very hard to stop meaning that unless they made a mistake you were going to lose. It was very hard to get right but the one alliance that really capitalized on it was the alliance of 51, 2485, 1918, & 781 as the #8 alliance on Archimedes as seen here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS_1EqSJoCU

The only place to stop the cycle was to keep 2485 from trussing since the first possession by 51, third possession by 1918, and scoring in the high goal were all executed by the human players tossing the ball to robots in the corner. It was a brilliant strategy that led to the highest un-penalized score of the year.

The only downside was it left a huge target on 2485's back (or the trussing robot on any other alliance that tried this strategy) by defenders who knew that as long as they could slow the truss down enough it would drastically slow the cycle down.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The only problem:
Only one of the four alliances you listed won with their strategy.

How can it then be undefendable?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I can talk about scouting a little bit. I know this year, we thought of something that was more important above everything else and chose to pick off of that. I also know we chose 1 hp bot and 1 L bot at every competition since we are an hp bot. I know at week 4, week 6, and championships, we knew that we needed step cans so we formed out alliances around that since we don't have can burglars. Using some of the # data (consistency) and some of the watching data we picked (how fast the can burglars were), we picked our alliances. Now sometimes , that doesn't necessarily work. Our championship alliance was a really good alliance. We had probably the fastest can burglars on Archimedes with a few exceptions. our alliance partners weren't necessarily the best stackers but, they had really good can burglars. I felt that if we go to the finals, we could have won Archimedes with that alliance by drying the other side out from cans. Unfortunately, we didn't have a big enough stacking ability on our alliance to move onto the finals. So Sometimes, it works. sometimes, it doesn't. We pretty much make a list of the primary items we need and then come up with a bunch of secondary things we also need. As seen in our championship alliance, we had too much of our first priority and not enough of our second priority. At every event we won, we were the 1st alliance captain which helps because you automatically know who to choose first. Having a good pick list is very important so your scouter doesn't freeze on the field during picking.

Since I'm a scouter, that's all I can help you with is game day strategy. Hopefully others have good things to say about design and other things you need. good luck and hopefully what I said made sense. ;)

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Because none of them executed the strategy correctly or had the exact composition of robots necessary to execute it perfectly.

Allow me to add emphasis:
It also produced one of the greatest upsets of the year. I also know you disagree with me on this, as we've discussed it several times. That's not the point of this thread.

Allow me to add a disclaimer, then:
These opinions on strategy are my own and are not comprehensive of what is or is not true about strategy of that specific year.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The point of this thread is to discuss "The Highest Levels of Play"

Death Cycles were not the highest level of play in 2014, because they almost never worked.

The 51-2485-1918 alliance may have won in quarters, but they lost to the eventual Division Champs in semis.

469-2056-1625 may have won IRI, but one could argue that they weren't running "Death Cycles" because 469 was moving and playing defense. On top of that, 330 proved that the robot in the corner WAS defendable, as they parked in front of 469 and made it hard for the HP to toss the ball in.

If you want to see the Highest Level of Play in 2014, there are a few Playlists on YouTube of Einstein Finals.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Also discussing the theoretical highest level of play. And I was asked a question about what death cycles were, so I explained them.

Furthermore, I believe the highest possible level of play for Aerial Assist was never met, as perfect death cycles were never executed, and repeatable catching was rarely executed.

The idea of this thread was to ask "How do you determine what the highest level of play is during build season?" because I seem to foresee it being higher than it ends up being, or at least different than it ends up being every year.

If you want to debate the merits and pitfalls (of which there are many) of death cycles with me, we can do so privately.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Woooooooow... I was THERE and I didn't know what that was :eek:

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

You've just answered your own. You look for highest possible levels of play. That's worthless. You need to look for highest achievable levels of play.

Now, how do you determine what is going to be important at those levels of play? I typically put together a simple simulation (excel) that lets me do various what if scenarios. I then tweak the number of things and see what happens. This often shows things that aren't worthwhile or things that are limiting factors. 2013 - it fairly easily showed that climbing could be out scored by a decent shooter[1]. 2014 - showed the importance of auton and that solo cycles were almost worthless. 2015 - That uncapped stacks were worthless.





Aside about Death Cycles - I think you VASTLY overestimate these. Actually, not pulling punches, I think you're full of crap when you say it was optimal AA play. Why? Because it requires 3 robots to be perfectly suited for each other. Which then has to happen in an actual alliance... which given how the draft works is all but impossible. Not only that, but given the ease of adding some PVC up to 5' to a defender bot (bonus points, backboard for inbounding) it makes the inbound to a stationary scoring bot VERY difficult.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Not necessarily. 148-1114-1923 were knocked out of Einstein by 5 points total (1.66 avg.). That is only 3 totes uncapped. Now generally, uncapped stacks made no difference but 12 points more a match can be important.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

You're mistaking important in an instance with important from a strategy perspective.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I agree with the first part. I suppose I've assumed teams would almost always rise to the maximum possible ability, as my first two games were 2011 and 2012, where for the most part, teams did. The games were nearly maxed out at times.

Now I could be totally wrong about death cycles in 2014, but I disagree that the right alliance couldn't have formed. 900 and 1918 were in the same division (which are basically the two robots necessary IMO to make it work), and I don't see a few inches of PVC stopping 1918's inbound.
(However, other problems, like 1918's occasional shooter problems and a missed inbound or two into 1918 could have spelled doom for that alliance, but it would have been incredible to see happen)

I feel like Aerial Assist had more room to grow strategically (which is amazing, considering how much that game evolved throughout the year). I wanted to see perfect death cycles executed, then countered by an alliance that abuses the lack of defense by executing repeatable catching and forcing the death cycle alliance to fall apart back to a normal style of play.

But I think that's part of the problem for me: I'm trying to look too deeply into a game that we don't have that much time to play. The game isn't going to evolve the way other sports do over years, it's going to evolve over 8 weeks of competition (and evolve immensely), and will be limited by size restrictions, power restrictions, etc, not just by player skill and ingenuity.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Bingo. Teams get better, but overall they start out pretty bad. So, when I make my spreadsheets I also do run through a "what's likely" analysis too. My general rule? If I think an action will take 3 seconds I multiply it by pi because I'm an idiot and tend to overestimate skill. (Or teams just generally suck)

I also do what I call sensitivity analysis: at what point do strategies become worthless because you're taking too long to do them?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Ok. i thought you were just being general. But from a strategy, yeah, useless.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The first reason for why alliances made are not always as good as they should be is bad scouting. whether it's because the team is biased, they don't have enough people to scout well, or their scouts just aren't accurate, this can cause them to create a poor alliance (or neglect to pick good robots... cough cough my team at DCMP the last two years cough cough)

as for gameplay at higher levels, not every team has the resources to create a robot competitive at the highest levels. another issue can be mis-analyzing parts of the game- members of my team, including myself, though that the totes would fall flat from the feeder of their own volition, and therefore didnt make any sort of ramp. this forced us at our first divisional to quickly change to landfill, which was quite an adjustment for the drive team. many other teams made similar mistakes, and later fixed their bots with ramps, full redesigns, etc.

also, to add onto andrew schriebner, 2 of the best PNW feeder bots this year, 955 and 4450, had first divisionals that were... less than stellar compared to their level of play at the end of the year. their strategies also changed completely; in playoffs, 955 was a capper, and 4450 was a landfill bot in their first competitions. both teams added ramps and became very good. nearly every bot from my division that made it to worlds this year improved an extent, but those two were the most radical changes.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

In 2013 I was determined that full court shooters were the end all be all, and while teams like 148, 67, 303, and 469 were amazing bots, the championship was won by lightning quick cycle bots and amazing defense.

In 2014 I laughed off blocker poles(and this was pretty much spot on until Einstein)

And in 2015 I expected to see WAY, WAY more can specialists at regional events, not only because that function only required one mechanism but they were in seriously high demand among the lower seeded alliances at both Chesapeake and Virginia.
The only really top notch ones I saw at our two regional events were 540, 2537, and 2377.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The highest level of play in any modern FRC game minus Recycle Rush is being able to adapt to what your opponent throws at you and what sort of alliance you are playing with. A good team can carry most alliances on their own and beat most other alliances. A great team can utilize their alliance members no matter their skill level and together beat any combination of good teams.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Exactly this, word for word. That's what the highest level of play is.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Sorry if I’m reviving a settled topic… but I feel the need to defend death cycles (warning: super biased perspective incoming) :o . It wasn’t so much that death cycles were hard to build for (our robot was painfully simple: catapult + wheels, no pickup required) or hard to qualify for champs with. I would think obscurity killed the concept more than anything. And even so, it almost happened! A 900+1918 alliance totally could have been made in Archimedes (single tear… If only we had been the 8th alliance’s second pick. << come to think of it, that’s a very rare kind of statement in FRC).

I’d argue that the component bots of death cycles were plenty competitive on their own. At defense-heavy regionals, an undefendable trusser might have been a huge asset for the top scorers (pure speculation from a North Carolinian here). Scoring from in front of the low goal in and of itself was also of great value for some excellent high-gaolers.

Case in point: When 900 saw the trussing component of death cycles, suddenly no other strategy held a candle, even though we were aiming for regionals, not champs. We weren’t even thinking about the ultimate partners because, well …. North Carolina (no offense to NC teams, please don’t hurt me!); the benefits to cycle speed of truss to human player alone were enough to convince us.

I would think the digging required to figure out death cycles is what kept the components from popping up, and, by extension, the concept’s fulfillment; teams would need to have realized that defense would be killer, cycle speed would be super important, and that human players could catch truss shots. Most teams willing to be that observant were, by no coincidence, great teams anyway, and so they didn’t need to pursue niche roles.

What I’m curious about is if the possibility/value of death cycles had not been so obscure (i.e. the rulebook said plainly “you can totally throw over the truss straight to the human player” and/or the animation video warned that plowie could kick the crud out of guys on the field) if things might have been different. Do you all think more teams might have pursued the components of death cycles, or by extension, that death cycles might have been more or fully realized?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Back on topic- I think a better title for this thread would be- "How do you get the game right early on?
How do you figure out what robots you'd see on the World Championship and IRI Championship alliances?

I'll use this year as an example:
I believed at the beginning of build season the highest levels of play would compose of: Landfill Stacker, HP Stacker, Capper.
No alliance would ever end up with more than 7 cans, which I believed a high-tier capper could manage to place all of, or at least most of. I figured the best human player stackers could make 4-5 uncapped stacks, and the best landfill stackers would be able to do the same.

What I failed to see is that while that could be effective in theory, so could three robots building stacks underneath cans.

When running human trials, we tried building stacks underneath cans and had the cans fall over and the humans couldn't carry the stacks well.

How do you account for the difference in what robots are able to do vs. what humans are able to do? Robots do some things faster than humans, while humans do some things faster than robots.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Experience.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Kevin, I was asking similar questions not so long ago.

Like Andrew, I usually use a spreadsheet to match actions with their scoring values and predicted times and difficulties to find what I believe to be the optimal strategy for my team. The priority order I usually use in picking designs is:

1. Win matches.
2. Seed high.
3. Desirable to partners.

Depending on where a team sits on the "food chain", this priority is likely to shift.

I originally did not intend to post in the thread, but I felt like I learned two important lessons since I made my post in the 2010 thread.

The first lesson may seem like a cop out, but what has been most valuable to me personally in analyzing games is simply experience. The more games I see, the better handle I get on what is a "realistic" way every new game will play out. Each year I've been able to get a firm grasp of how match play will look earlier and earlier in the build season because I can relate it to previous games. This has been very helpful in guiding students to the right strategies, and asking them questions that deepen their understanding of the year's challenge.

The second lesson is to never accept your understanding of how the game will play as final. This applies equally during build season and competition season. There have been years where I've analyzed the game, had an excellent understanding of it for week one, and then failed to update my analysis. The best understanding of a game comes from constantly questioning, how does my strategy hold up under X, Y, or Z circumstance. A great way to do this is during build season is to find friends on other teams and compare their strategies to yours. During competition season, I find it easier to watch as many webcasts as possible and figure out how to react to the current metagame. For example, if you couldn't pass back to the human player by 2014 championship, you were at a real disadvantage. Strategy should constantly evolve as you learn new information -- getting your strategy perfect early on is not as important as adapting quickly and getting it perfect every match.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I'd have to disagree with this and would instead suggest:

1. Seed high
2. Win matches
3. Desirable to partners


While typically, winning matches is the key to seeding high it is not always the case. Reading the manual and understanding HOW to seed high is incredibly important to controlling your own destiny come alliance selection time.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Fixed that for you. ;)

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I would add playoff versus qualifying strategies as well. Recycle rush had elements that were different in qualifying and playoffs with co-op and can races. At our second event, we realized that we made more of a qualifying robot than a playoff robot. We seeded high at every event in position to be a captain, but failed to bust into the finals losing in the semi finals all year (except MSC we survived octo and were eliminated in quarters).

After going through this season, I would say it is better to design a playoff bot that might seed lower and contend for the finals, than a qualifying bot that just can't quite cut it in the playoffs. This was a different element than previous years IMO.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

This actually brings up something that is on my mind right now. When does it become necessary/advantageous for a more average team to build multiple robots to compete at both a regional/district level and at the championship level?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

When you are willing to commit to the almost-every-day-after-build-season schedule that you need to get your value out of the 2nd robot.

Since the second robot is a huge time and money sink, to get the full value out of it, you need to spend a lot of time practicing with it and upgrading it. There are many teams that build the second robot, but don't execute on it right (they don't behave the same, or they don't commit to the practice schedule required to truly get mileage out of it).

I believe that teams that don't build practice robots should focus on strategies with low movement that still score good points, with a focus on minimizing the impact of driver error and on game piece control in their robot design.

In regards to the priority discussion---

Our priorities in 2013/2014 were these:
1. Win local competitions
2. Do well at world competitions

For 2015, it was:
1. Get to Einstein
--though priorities from the past years factored a lot into the design.

We always try to build robots to be the #1 pick for elimination rounds and try to include all the features that might make someone want to pick us (we had a goal to have the fastest can grabber in MAR this year, in addition to wanting to have a 3-tote auto to seed high and to score points from the landfill, since we figured it was the harder task to do and would thus be more desirable at high levels where there would be a ton of feeder station bots).

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

We started building a second robot in 2013. Here's a general synopsis of how it has affected us:

No practice bot: 2008-2012
-2 championship appearances in 5 years
-no appearances in championship eliminations
-no regional wins
-normally seeded 15-30
With practice bot: 2013-
-2 championship appearances in 3 years
-2 appearances in championship eliminations
-1 division win
-1 regional win
-normally seed 1-10

In 2013, we simply decided we wanted to have one so we did it. We had a rough start, not actually finishing the practice bot until week 2 of regionals, but it helped immensely. It's always advantageous to have a practice robot, it will allow you to make huge improvements to your robot during competition season.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Let me clarify my question a bit. I think y'all are assuming I meant building two identical robots. That's not quite what I meant.

When does it become necessary/advantageous for a more average team to build two different robots to compete at both a regional/district level, using Robot A and strategy A and at the championship level, using Robot B and strategy B?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I think that's a contradiction in terms. Building two different robots is beyond the capability of an average team. If they're capable of building two different competitive robots in three months, they are considerably above average.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Re: Two different robots,

Its interesting to look at what some teams that were prequalified for champs did. Both 27 and 2848 went specialist routes, both being canburglars/cappers. I can't say whether this would have changed if they werent prequalified, but on our team, our early ideas involved being a tote specialist. We scrapped that design because we didn't want to rely on other teams for most of our points at the regional level (now our robot ended up relying on other teams anyway, but that's a different problem). At champs we thought that design would have done well, but we still had to qualify first.

In short, building a champs specific robot and a regional specific robot probably won't be feasible for most teams. The time and money investment only makes sense if you know you'll qualify for champs. But if you've already qualified, why build a regional specific robot at all?

There could also be an argument made for qualification specific designs vs. Elimation specific designs.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I don't think I've ever heard of a team building two different robots intended for use at different levels of competition.
I'm also not sure there's a legal way of doing so within the rules of FRC.

The only comparisons I can come up with are total robot rebuilds, where much of the robot is rebuilt or replaced using the withholding allowance and COTS parts, and when 2826 brought an entirely new machine with them to IRI 2013.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Could you give an example of what your talking about happening? Because I see two ways this might be happening. One is like what 1241 and 1285 did this year having two robots with two strategies? The other is like what 900 did this year with the harpoons at champs.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Fair point. Maybe I meant "above average".

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

1285 and 1241 are two separate teams based in one school. Last year, which was 1285's rookie year, they built identical robots, but this year they stayed as separate as possible. For all intents and purposes, they're two distinct teams (like 254 and 1868). It's actually a really cool program: all the students get to choose what team they join at the beginning of the year. Apparently the numbers naturally split with more rookies / second year students going to 1285, and the veterans gravitating towards 1241.

I think a more relevant example would be 503 in 2008. After seeing 1114's dominant performance at Midwest that year, Frog Force completely revamped their design and played in Newton with a very Simbot-esque design. They were obviously not as polished as 1114 that year, though, and while the designs were similar, it didn't really work out for them in the long run. There aren't any videos from Great Lakes that year, so I don't know exactly when they made the switch. Compare: Week 1 Midwest regional and Newton Division.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I don't know that I have a specific example in mind honestly. What I can do though is explain why this is on my mind lately.

North Carolina is moving to a district model for 2016. No surprise there really. However, if you've been watching 900, you'll know that we're a fan of the niche play the last few years. It makes it fun and different for us.

District play doesn't lend itself to niche roles though and if we hope to get back to St Louis (and we do) then we may have to 'abandon' our unique interpretations of the rules in favor of building a robot that is a little more mainstream.

Nothing wrong with that but I'm not under any delusions that we could keep up with the teams who have been building robust and awesome mainstream robots for many years. We're good but we ain't that good. Having a more mainstream robot instead of a niche play is less valuable at Championships if we seek to go further... and we do. I suspect that the niche robots are more valuable as alliance partners during selections at Championships than they are at a district event. Of course, I could be completely wrong.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I'd argue that niche play is more likely to make championships in the district model than in a regional model.

Take 27 and 2848 for examples. If they weren't pre-qualified teams, 27 would have made championships (by merit of their MSC finalist appearance), and 2848 would not have, as they only made finals at their second event, where 1817 received a wildcard, and they would not have.

Both were solely cappers, and both ended up in championship eliminations.

Role players are likely to consistently make eliminations at their events, and thus accrue district points, as well as robot awards. And with the stuff I know 900 is capable of(building sold machines with sick controls), you should have no problem qualifying for championships via district points with your machines.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Obviously, every game is different, but I would put a lot of caution into intentionally designing as a "niche" or "support" robot in a district structure. Generally speaking, you're taking away your ability to "control your own destiny" when it comes to district ranking and reach the district CMP and subsequently the CMP. In some areas, a large enough portion of the population will reach DCMP that you may be willing take that risk and hope you end up on a successful DCMP alliance. In others, you may end up watching from home.

Sometimes a niche/support robot won't even be viable/useful at lower levels of play. There were teams who's only real utility was grabbing center cans that went undrafted at district events this year, because at those events, simply putting up points was more valuable than getting additional cans that weren't likely to be utilized. Keep in mind that alliance captains will often have goals other than winning the entire tournament in the district structure, as a semi-finals or finals run is worth more than a boom-or-bust run that loses in the quarters.

Other times, a quality niche/support robot will curse itself to the "valley of doom." Frequently, the top notch support robots will be selected at the end of the first round or early part of the second round of alliance selection, ending up on one of the lower ranking alliances as a result. Prior to 2015, that meant a QF tango with some of the top ranked teams at the event, not a favorable scenario to be in. Each team will need to do that math to determine if a couple ~8 point selections and QF exits will be enough points for them to reach their DCMP, as it will vary based on district size.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

With only six weeks to work on the robot and an extremely busy seven week competition season, even the best teams need to realize that doing everything perfectly just isn't possible.

The highest level of play is usually achieved by teams who pick one method of scoring, and become the absolute best at it. Reliability is just so important in FRC, and there isn't time for any team to completely master every part of every game. If build season was a year long, things might be different.

1114 in 2015 couldn't do coopertition, pick up stacks of multiple totes, or place containers on top of existing stacks, yet only missed Einstein finals by a few points because of reasons unrelated to their design.

In 2013, Einstein wasn't filled with 30 point climbers because teams who prioritized shooting were simply able to score more points. 1114, one of the best robots with a 30 point climber that year ended up being eliminated after they slipped off and could no longer climb the tower.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

This is definitely one of our biggest design requirements - we want to be able to control our own destiny by aiming for the number one seed. This drives the design of our robot.

We knew we wanted to get that autonomous tote stack ourselves, because the likeliness of three individual robots getting that stack together was approximately 0%.

There's a bit of gut feeling involved as well; we figured a robot that could build an entire stack within itself and then score it (the bottom-up stacking style) would be more efficient than one that made stacks on the platform one at a time.

I'll probably edit in more things later.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

team 2980 managed it this year: their robot had some sort of structural issue at their second event, so they completely disassembled it, and it was rebuilt by DCMP... IDK how they managed it, though...

also, on the subject of practice robots: they only help if you make robots that are at least decent. 2013 is the smudge on my team's record, and our practice bot didn't do too much to help. heck, even when it could climb, the competition robot still couldn't on field. however, this year, our robot was about average, but because of all the driving practice, we were able to become slightly above average, and discovered that we could upright containers

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I disagree again:

1. Desireable
2. seed high
3. win matches

at DCMP this year, my team seeded well, 17th (I think), yet we weren't picked because our skillset didn't quite line up with what other alliances wanted. at Champs, we seeded in the 50's, but were picked as the 3rd robot because our skillset was desirable to that alliance (they all liked upright containers, and we could upright them. also canburglar. you can't control your schedule, but if you show well, you could succeed anyway

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

My impression of the mid-season or CMP rebuilds was that they were not being planned as of stop build day, but arose as a teams recognized that the level and/or style of competition was different than initial expectations, or perhaps the initial design never worked out as well as was hoped.

To plan to build two robots, you would probably want to design your drive base to support both configurations, and limit yourself in the second design to things which can be built from COTS and a few pounds of manufactured parts in a few hours. You would also want to build at least three drive bases: Competition, Driver practice (initial configuration), and development (second configuration, and driver practice). I would also wait until after week 2 to get serious on the build of the CMP configuration, as the game style doesn't even begin to gel until then. Do designs and maybe a prototype, but unless you have the manpower to build and tweak several designs simultaneously, hold off building until you can pick the one with confidence. Of course, you always have the option of not changing to your second design.

As you obviously have lots of people to pull this off, you may also want to have a backup drive team to help tune the second robot, if not to drive it at competition.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

So you'd rather NOT control your destiny... ok, well, that makes 0 sense.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

16 made a whole new robot for 2013 IRI as well.

If you're the first seed but you're not desirable, nobody would hesitate to decline your pick. Curie 2013 and Wisconsin 2015 come to mind.

1. win matches
2. desirability
3. seed high

I have no problem with being a pick if I can consistently win matches, and being a desirable robot generally increases your likelihood of being picked by another high scoring, less in-demand robot that corresponds with your design. (landfill & feeder, trusser & finisher) Generally, winning is going to make you seed high, and you'll be desirable because you win. Just my two cents.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

If you are not a top team and likely unable to build a robot capable of seeding high, it makes sense to build a robot that is desirable instead of trying (and likely failing) to build a robot that can do the necessary things to seed high.


In terms of teams building two robots to compete well at both the regional and championship level, I think we have already seen that to an extent (I don't consider the long list of teams who realized they made a design mistake and rebuilt their robot once they saw how the game was played). I don't have any examples, but I'm sure there were top teams, realizing the value of getting the cans quickly in auto at the high level of play, putting off spending too many resources into can-burglers until later in the year when they were more valuable and instead putting more of their effort in the traits that help early in the year (such as stacking and capping).

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

It can seem like a very reasonable line of thought when your program is relatively consistently "bad" at tournaments, and while I know you've expressed that these teams might consider another STEM program that isn't FRC, the fact is that these teams vastly outnumber "good" teams. Looking up, the odds of picking versus being picked don't look good when you've never been on the picking side.

Now, personally, I believe that trying to be in control is preferable to resigning myself to being at the mercy of the serpentine draft gods, but I can see how a reasonable person would come to a different conclusion.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

well to be fair, our robots are at least in the top half of robots at any given competition (excluding 2013), usually in the top 5 at district/ regional events. however, the scheduling gods hate us, so we are often ranked much lower than we should be. Sometimes being desirable is being a really good robot that had some bad matches and is therefore ranked low.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

We didn't go to champs in 2013, my rookie year, so I had no idea what to expect but I did expect WAY more scouting than what occurred on Galileo in 2014. Seeding high is just the most important thing in trying to win an event because as we've learned first hand that if you aren't going to sell yourself you cannot trust other teams to scout. We've never really had a problem in my three years at any of the regional events as we always are pretty near the top seeds or get picked pretty early, but we always seem to get absolutely amazing second picks from really high seeds(looking at 623, 4050, 2068 and 1610 here) that really should have gone WAY earlier.

2481 was easily the 4th best robot and maybe even tied for 3rd on Galileo in 2014 and was the 2nd pick of the 5th seeded alliance, seriously? Same with this year as well on Archimedes, there was no reason 314 or 3996(especially 3996 with how late they went) should have fallen that far: 2nd pick of the 8th seed and 2nd pick of the 1st seed respectively.

Even more so at regional events for some teams however, considering we attend events that often have really weird seeding when you get past the 3rd or 4th position. You might feel like you have a great robot but you seriously just cannot trust teams to scout.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I think the best way to actually answer Kevin original question - how can you predict what's going to matter in high level play? - would be to analyze past mistakes and see what things your analysis is missing, then focus on strengthening those missing areas. In a way it seems like it's not a matter of going "what's going to be the most important?" as much as "is this game task going to matter, how much?".

Full disclosure: I thought there was more of a place for an independent stacker this year than there was.

I think the most obvious thing missed with a specialist alliance versus an all around alliance is that the specialist alliance basically must work slower. Stackers (for the most part) remain just as good at stacking whether or not they manipulate a can. They take barely any time at all to get a can on top, and then from there it is just as fast to build a stack. Also important is that the time investment involved for most stackers to get a can in position is BEFORE building a stack, not after. A pure stacker is not really doing much more tote stacking than a stack and cap robot, and a pure capper is most certainly not using its time as efficiently either.

This was an easy thing to call wrong this year; in basically every other FRC game there was a strong argument for specializing on tasks. This year was kind of the perfect storm against specialization - the same manipulators could stack totes and bins, so there wasn't much compromised in going for both. It was actually faster all around to score both, as well. In almost any other game, building an all around robot involves some big design compromises, the "jack of all trades is the master of none" principle of splitting engineering load, etc. etc.

As for step totes, I'll be straight, I have no idea why you thought they were important at all. Did you think seven stacks from the HP and / or landfill wouldn't be enough?

First I want to say that this is something a lot of teams "called wrong" in the sense that they spent some design effort on being able to perform catches when they really didn't need to. Teams like 254, 2056, 469, 1114, 118, etc. all came out of the gate with catching features on their robots. However, these teams all properly evaluated the game and determined that this task was the lowest priority. This decision meant that other game tasks drove their design and catching was more tacked on at the end.

The choice to make catching a lower priority was fairly obvious from the game layout. In a cycle game, what's less important than points per cycle is the overall rate of scoring. Catching adds 10 points to a cycle, enough that five catching cycles is the equivalent of six non catching cycles. Six cycles in roughly 2 minutes is roughly 20 seconds a cycle; five cycles is roughly 25 seconds a cycle. Does a good catch add less than 5 seconds to a cycle? Defense on both sides of the equation, the relatively narrow target for the ball to land in, the swiftness and ease of trussing in the vague general direction of the undefendable human player, all of these factors worked against catching from the beginning. Properly identifying the truss to human player strategy, the somewhat awkward role of a second-assist midfield robot, and being realistic about defense are what was necessary to see that catch just wasn't going to happen. (Stop trying to make catch happen!)

More than anything else, the 30 point climb was just incredibly difficult. First realize that a 30 point climb is +20 points over a normal robot since robots of any sort should be able to hang for 10. Second, an additional cycle is 12 points. It's far, far less effort to make a robot that you already need to make good at shooting discs a bit faster than it is to build one of the hardest mechanisms in FIRST history. Ultimately, the 30 point climb received its proper time in the spotlight as a difference maker in the IRI eliminations - but this is when every capable alliance was draining the human player station already!

The problem here isn't strategy, it's that you were just making stuff up really. Don't worry, we were all freshmen once. ;) But seriously - we talk a lot about strategy before design, but that doesn't necessarily mean committing to a strategy before prototyping. Learning how foam balls would travel differently over longer distances required putting them in wheeled shooters and letting them fly, at which point it would be pretty obvious that range beyond the key would be at best difficult.

So what are the common themes here? A lot of times it's hard to judge what teams are capable of building. This gets easier with experience, but oftentimes trying it yourself is the fastest way to find out if it's really possible. And don't be afraid to revise strategic decisions after learning it wasn't as easy as you guessed - way too many teams don't do this.

In your other cases, it seemed you didn't have a good grasp of match flow and how that effects what designs work best. How easy the task is to complete, how seamlessly it integrates itself into other strategies, how much coordination is required to pull off the task, how "worth it" the task is, all of these considerations are important. Think about what matches without that feature and what matches with that feature would look like. What would the alliance without the feature do to compensate? It's not always as simple as "score a little bit more in other ways".

Hope this wasn't a totally useless post.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I thought the same thing; that the inverted and step totes would matter on Einstein. When the two alliances split the cans 5 and 5, then making 7 stacks of 6 isn't enough if the alliance on the other side of the step can make 9.

I thought that the "top 8" threshold for a typical regional would be a bit lower (regularly scoring about 50 tote+RC points), but that the alliances heading to Einstein would be stronger, needing to score inverted and/or step totes to beat the others on Einstein.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

My team doesn't worry about how the game will play at the highest levels. We figure the odds of our getting there aren't good enough to need to be worried.

Instead, we focus on how we can bring our highest level of play to the game--and hopefully get those odds higher and higher.


Because of that, extreme high-level play is tagged with "godbot" when used in strategy discussions, and used primarily to figure out how to get picked as an ally to such teams, as well as to help determine a more achievable play level for our robot to have--but still a stretch. For example, if we think that Poofs will score 4 noodled 6-stacks/match, we'll be targeting more on the order of 2 noodled 5-stacks and one totes-only 5 stack. (I don't remember exactly what we figured for this year--but it was something along those lines.)

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Actually, yeah, I did.
My assumption for the best alliance in the world at the beginning of build season was:
Human Player Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the human player station
Landfill Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the landfill
Capper; Capable of capping 5-7 stacks
I figured the best landfill robots in the world would be able to make stacks out of upside-down or step totes to come up with the extra landfill stacks.

Catching was lower on our priority list than almost all other functionality in 2014, but we executed on the other functionalities on our list, so it worked out. But at the beginning of build season, I believed that ideally a robot-robot catch at the highest levels would take the same amount of time as trussing to the human player and having them load the ball into the robot. We had a few catching cycles in Archimedes Qualifications 2014 that were our fastest cycles of the day, because we caught the ball, turned around, and made the shot.

Climbs ended up being a difference-maker at IRI, but had 1986 or 254 attended IRI, we could have seen an alliance with three climbs and a 7-disc auto, and a centerline auto. That's what I expected the highest levels to be. Almost every disc and climb possible scored.

For the record, I was a sophomore at the time. :P
We did terrible prototyping in 2012 under extremely controlled conditions where we used the exact same ball to make the shots because for some reason we thought balls at competition would be more consistent. That came down to me not understanding how engineering worked at the time. :D
Thank you, Chris, for responding in a constructive way about the subject matter I intended to discuss. It was interesting.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Thread Title: Highest Levels of Play
Current Discussion Topic: Strategic Decision Making for "bad" teams.

Andrew is confused.
Andrew hurt himself in his confusion.

Ignoring the whole concept of resigning yourself to mediocrity and how that's bad... the topic is how to predict what high levels of play are going to look like. In essence, we're asking "What Would Beatty Do?" So, discussing what "bad" teams do/should do is pointless.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I agree with you for the most part about this topic being way off base.

However, there is an argument for not caring about seeding highly to compete at the highest levels of play. Let's say you're a low resource team in 2012 who wants to compete with the best. Should you attempt to build a top-tier scorer so you can maybe seed (even though that was NOT an easy thing to do that year), or should you build a wide feeder bot in hopes of being a desirable third robot.

For teams looking to compete at any level, priorities could be different than yours or mine.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

You build 4334 and win your division and IRI. (and also the coopertition award at your regional and your division).

ATA identified the highest level of competition and built a tiny robot that could steal balls and make it so two long robots could triple balance. They did this with a robot made mostly out of 80-20. I also want to point out that they seeded pretty well: 13th at GTRE and 16th on a really deep Archimedes field. For all intents and purposes, they tried their best to control their fate (which is pretty admirable for a robot that couldn't score any balls).

This case study just shows that it's possible to: analyze the game to identify the highest level of competition, realize you can't be a "main" robot at that level, identify a niche on the ideal alliance, build for that niche, while also not sacrificing seeding ability. 4334 built a simple robot that seeded a lot higher than plenty of ball-scoring robots, because they figured the game out.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The best robot in the world in 2012 was built mostly of 80/20.
http://www.thebluealliance.com/team/341/2012

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

I suspect many teams didn't know about 314's performance at MSC. They tried landfilling during many of their qualifiers, and it generally didn't go well. Although they were great at their ramp, on paper their performance looked inconsistent and sub-par. On the other hand, we got very lucky when 3996 fell to the back of the draft. They saved our alliance a couple times, if you watch our third semifinal and second final match.

We thought the same thing. Those weird, seemingly useless wheels on our elevator? Yeah, those were originally to provide compression on upside down totes. The chopsticks don't close far enough to actually grab an upside down tote, but the wheels still provide extra compression on containers.


More on topic...

Generally, my speculation on the "highest level of play" is somewhat close. We immediately threw out catching in 2014 because we felt it was pretty much impossible. However, my thoughts on 2015 were a little off. I figured most teams wouldn't be building stacks taller than 4 totes + container, and we'd only see the importance of high stacks by Einstein. I knew the can battle was going to happen... I didn't think it'd get so intense.

I'd like to comment on the "highest level of play" occuring at IRI, but some of the rule changes are too significant to really compare what happens there to what happened on Einstein.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

This exactly was my early season soap box rant, that making stacks higher than 4 wouldn't be necessary, and to be fair at every regional we attended 3 capped 4 stacks with noodles would get you to the semi's.

On a different note I thought way more teams with just capper and stacker-only bots would be able to function at the team 27 type level, to the point where in some of our strategy breakdowns pretty much our whole team though that independent single function bots would do really well on all levels.

What I've learned on anticipating the highest levels of play is that whatever I think will be normal and a good goal, double that output and you have yourself the actual high levels of play.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

The highest levels of play always seem to use every possible point, and score for the maximums. It's important to do points analysis to figure out which strategy gives the most points in a match.
This year, 6 totes + can.
2014 was pretty vanilla, good drivers and speed were required.
2013 didn't require the 30pt climb, but only because it was worth more points to throw frisbees for most teams. 254 and 1114 had fast climbers, but fell short before the finals (not sure why though, it seemed very close).
2012 was shooting and balancing; 1114 got it right with the assisted balance clamps.
2011 had top rung scoring.
Etc. etc.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

30 point climbs at speeds quick enough that it didn't inhibit cycles (we'll say sub 30 seconds for line up and climb) was extremely difficult and only a handful of teams pulled it off to a point that it was more valuable for them to climb than to score discs. It was also an incredibly hard task and the faster you went the more problems you ran into which I know from experience on 3467 that year. At that point in the season with some robots with 3-5 events under their belts those climbers were abused. The Championship was a nightmare of climbing issues for our robot and 1114 had their own struggles in the elimination rounds.

And whenever you start breaking down that's when your opponents are plowing ahead and outscoring you.

Climbing showed more value at IRI with climbers rebuilt over the summer (like ours was) and a higher level of play meaning quick climbs helped sway matches as the feeder stations and field were being emptied.

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Ehhh, there was a reason. We had an alright performance, granted I think it was over looked heavily. We still had a badass alliance...
-Ronnie

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Relevant to this thread Ronnie, 314 was really really good at MSC. What made you guys decide it needed upgrades?

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

We had changes planned for MSC, I had the mechanism designed before week 6 actually in hopes we would modify by our 3rd district and fine tune for MSC and champs. We saw where our bot was...and then where 1023 was. To us, that was our main competition for MSC and champs. They had been super consistent and beat us by having the 20pt auto. We felt to better our chances of winning, we needed four stacks or can grabbers. We had both designed but ended up going with the movable can stabilizer. Due to some programming and mechanical problems, the best we got was 3 stacks can and noodled plus a few totes I believe. It really wasn't working best until elims at worlds...I thought our alliance performed well enough to make a finals appearance and knock out the number 1 seed; I think we missed it by what 6 points? We never reached that goal of 4 but we put a ton of effort into it and were happy as a team with the results. Also, at MSC in the octo-finals match 2, we broke our can stabilizer which caused us not to move into quarters (it broke after our first stack placement, we were pretty much getting 3 stacks so those 80 points hurt; also enough for us to move on).

-Ronnie

Re: The Highest Levels of Play
 

Drost, Schriebs (didnt quote you but I know you're watching). The priority list is actually.

DO SOMETHING.

Then win matches, if that means you'll seed well.

Seed well, if you hope to win at the end of the day.

Be the most desirable team in the field.

The most desirable team in the field usually builds a machine focused on execution, not results. I would rather lose 10 matches to 1114/148/254 than win 20 matches at 50 pints up, to a field of nobodies. Execution, not results, it's the step stool to success. Successful teams produce results, but they always always need someone that can execute. The alliance at MAR CMP in 2014 was once such case -2590 was a cornerstone of execution in a difficult field, but then 341 and 11 played a game that no one really understood. We went out to the field to complete objectives, rarely, if ever to actually win a watch. We activitely devalued and worked against our opponents efforts, while also highlighting our own.

Correct.

341 focused on execution and consistency in 2012 - reliability; a roomba and the inability to remove luck cost them a championship. Had they had not built on a platform of Bosch, they'd have handily taken Einstein, without actually trying. Their underlying reliability issues stemming from compromise after compromise ultimately cost them at the championship, a bit of bad luck with a bridge and a rooms forced them to play an extra match where a transmission failed, a backup ticked was lost lost, and a shooter wheel delaminatated.

No matter what level you play on, remove variables... Win championships.