Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Aerial Assist in 2014 was bad because of the crazy defense, but this year it seems like even the game itself is trying to break your robot. And not only do you have to deal with defense and the defenses, everyone's drivetrains are built to climb over things that happen to be roughly the height of most people's bumpers. Add to that all the brawls between robots' intakes in the neutral zone and it starts to make sense why so many robots this year aren't performing at their best come finals. What do you think? Is FIRST Stronghold the roughest FRC game to date?

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

[sarcasm] Nah, Recycle Rush was rougher. [/sarcasm]

At least you're not fighting as much over the central resources (balls, cans, etc.)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I would tend to disagree; over the past couple days at MAR Champs we got into many tough fights for boulders in the neutral zone, a couple of which severely incapacitated our robot (a particular battle in semifinals broke our 3D printed camera mount and was the reason our shooting was off in the finals).

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'm not denying there is still a competition for central resources; that will probably always be there. Thing is, there is another source for balls (rolling them into the Secret Passage), so it may lighten up the game a little. Surely, if there were only six balls in the middle, the roughness would be much worse.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I would say yes. Even the field can't handle it. At every event I've seen this year, there has been at least one robot that left a part on the field. Even some of the robots have decided they don't want to play and this year and made a break for it in autonomous! :yikes:

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

When it comes to field-to-robot damage, I would agree that this year is probably one of the most rough I've seen. In terms of robot-to-robot damage though, I would actually call this years game pretty tame. With the field as restricted as it was, and the rules on defense what they were, it made it difficult for many situations that would normally result in robot-to-robot damage to occur.

The issue you brought up with bumpers is more about weight distribution and the "bumper zone" being too large. This was also an issue in 2010 when teams had to mount their bumpers high, and would constantly end up driving up over each other, or pushing each other vertically.

As far as manipulators go, basically any time there is a game where you have to extend some part of your robot outside your frame perimeter (ie, most games) you have the risk of damage to it. I for one, think they should bring back the line that used to be in every game animation that was something to the effect of "robots should be built robustly to withstand impacts from other robots and game pieces". If you're worried you might break it, make it stronger or bring a spare. ;)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Accompanied by a shot of poor Dozer having something fall on him and breaking as a result. I miss Dozer!

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

It's probably the most brutal in the modern era but the 2v2 era had some doozies. 422 painted their offseason robot red in 2003 primarily to see how much paint they could put on other robots.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Dozer was back this year, just in slightly different form.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

This year is the hardest game on your bot in my opinion. Yes there were some hard hits in aerial assist... but the bots didn't drive over each other. And of course, field to robot damage is definitely the worst this year. The number of bots that broke down 2 or 3 matches into elims (because they had no chance to check the bot between matches) is insane this year.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Yes. This year was rough.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

In 2014, the impacts were mostly in the bumper area from defense, as most teams had intakes that went over the large ball and folded back into the robot to protect them.

This year however, many intakes are lower to go under the low bar, and pick up the small balls, making for mechanisms that occasionally slam into defenses and the floor when crossing. There's also a lot of impact load on the drivetrain from repetitively slamming into the ground with 120-pounds of robot which causes problems with some drivetrains.

So I would say this year is much worse for robot damage.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Yes, In my opinion bots were hurt much more slamming into the ground than other bots. Our bot caught huge air over the rockwall and chevaldefrise, if we had put our 2014 bot through that same stress, the drive train would have just shattered.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'd love to see some data on the number of backup robots called this year versus previous years. Without looking at some data, I qualitatively say that this is easily the roughest game, if not ever, then at least in a long time.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'd say if you don't see hard robot to robot action at your events, you may want to look at some IN competitions sometime. Lots of hard defense in IN this year resulting in 2 red cards and some really heart breaking robot failures. Not sure if any teams have hurt feelings for other teams though. Everyone in IN seems to like each other. Anyway, the big surprise is that a huge amount of the robot to robot hits have been in the neutral zone. Lots of boulder fights and lots of trying to slow cycle times. This robot to robot roughness doesn't happen too much in quals but has definitely happened in elims a lot.