Team Hammond
 

Does any one know why team 71 Team Hammond seeded so low?

the only thing i know that deals with T71 is that the were part of a strong alliance.

maybe there avg'd qp's were low everyone seeds according to avg'd qps.

people put to much emphasis on seeding, if you dominated every match (clearing the field)then off course your gonna seed low with first's crazy scoring rules.

however some of the lowest seeding teams did very well in the finals,

Curie was a tough division. Alot of good bots ended up seeding low this year.

A:

FIRST-2003 resembled/allowed/became Battle Bots. Hammond was the natural target!

Re: Team Hammond
 

Team Hammond had, in my opinion, the best flailer machine in the competition but once they hit the wall they seemed a bit slow and had a high center of gravity. It made their machine vulnerable to being pushed around or excluded from the ramp.

Please don't consider this a negative coment. The Beatty team is one of the greats and a team we feel fortunate to have played against (we missed our chance last year). All should be proud of the great machine they built and the major accomplishments the team has under it's belt.

WC



:cool:

People keep talking about how traditionally excellent robots did not seed well due to FIRST's scoring. The object of the game is to score the most points. Our bot was by far the best, but it was simple. We knew how to play the game well, and thats what did it for us. Bots play a giant role in how well you do, but the rest of it is all on how you play the game.

yeah, we wondered how the heck you guys kept getting the top seed, as our bot was very simple. However, I'm sure a ton of people wondered the same thing about us at nats. Our bot isnt really anything special. We've got above average pushing power, decent speed, and a quick 2 stacker, but thats it.

OMG!!!


I am sooooo sorry.

Earlier i posted a message. I made a typo, I left out the word "not". I meant to say that out bot was by far NOT the best!!!! oh my, somebody just pointed that out to me.


Sorry for the confusion.

please forgive my stupidity.

VERY TRUE!

Your robot was very good this year and it was awesome to see an Indiana team represent this year at Midwest and nats. Way to go! :)

I wish/hope/pray that people will get off the Battlebots thing. The interaction between robots made the matches better, and more exciting. The best part of nearly every match was the scramble for the top.

While interaction was great (and pushing matches are always fun!), watching webcasts made me realize how much like 'Battlebots' this year's competition was. Lots of flipping, pushing, and tearing apart. I think a lot of teams went out there with a definite strategic plan but at the same time could only counteract someone else's strategy. Instead, they went out there with what they would like to have happened and just went along with what the other drivers and bots did. If you were losing, I guess all you could really do is play defense - and autonomous really determined who would play offense and defense. A lot of teams just gave up on their stackers and just cleared the field instead (of both robots and bins).

Beatty went with a great strategy again this year. What more can be said besides 'you can't win them all'? Now I'm just afraid that they will be quite a force to be reckoned with next year. :)

You can wish/hope/pray all you want; but the question posed was – What happened to Hammond? In my opinion (to which I believe I’m entitled) the best way to counter Hammond’s awesome flailer was to hit them hard before they could deploy. That fact wasn’t lost on Hammond’s opponents, as evidenced by the number of times they were run at in the Regionals as well as the Nats, where they were toppled out-of-bounds and had their pivot tubes bent in the process. The referees endorsed the tactic by disabling #71 and not penalizing the Bot that put them there.

Don’t get me wrong. The pushing, shoving, and the battles for the top made for an exciting game. On the other hand, some of us have serious doubts as to whether we can stay below the $3.5k ceiling while building our machines to military specs in order to survive the game.

So, let’s be careful what we wish. Or, we’ll end up wearing asbestos suits and sporting heavy armor plate as we try to dodge the Pulverizer.

Team 341's (4th seed) partners were 175 (17th seed) and 236 (60th seed). We still ended up carrying the division - it just goes to show that sometimes the best robots don't seed well.

Seeding Overatted
 

Seeding has more to do with luck and playing style than ability to win.

Parings in QP matches are random so the luck of the draw decides how even the teams are. Often the bot with the worst partner in a close match often loses and suffers the low score. Bots paired with better partners that win get the same score even if they break or get disabled early in the match.

Executing your strategy the best and winning doesnt guarantee high QP's. Last year Beatty grabbed three goal and crawled into their scoring zone making it impossible for their opponents to win. They never got the 30 points for those goals, because QPs last year were 3X the losing score last year (possibly zero point for winning). Ball bots seeded better last year. Beatty did not seed but was the first pick by #1 seed Rage 173 (a great ball bot). This year some bots colluded to keep the score high win or lose. Fixing matches is not a feature that will help a bot win elims but they got high seeds. In 2001, seeding was more meaningful because the objective of the 4 bot alliance was to score the absolute highest amount of points possible.

Actually building a durable machine is not as hard as you think it is. 80/20 Profile and Bosch Profile is tough as nails and easy to assemble. I know quite a few people have used it in their battlebots and this is the second year our team has used it. We have never had a problem with the robot breaking. It is easy to assemble and durable. (We let last years robot roll off the table with only minor damage) It can take a fall off a bench top and still be good to go. Not to mention the oddles and oddles of fun connectors you can buy. Its a tad expensive than just plain old metal and bolts but it's much more versitile.

Easy solution: build a bot that doesn't get pushed easily, and can withstand being hit. For example(I don't mean to be egotistical, but I know more about our robot than I do about others): During a match in our division elimination rounds, we were flipped completely upside down. We were like that for probably a good 1:15 before being flipped back over by our alliance partners, 302. We were still able to drive, clear out boxes, and eventually win the match. We ran it in the next match, and it worked perfect. Another exaple is the Martians, team 494. They were a fast robot that was kind of difficult to control. Their speed gave them great advantages in getting to the wall in auto, and knocking down stacks. They caused, and took many hits and still managed to make it to every qualification match in the two regionals I saw them in, and not break once. Also, I specifically asked a Referee while waiting in line at Six Flags, if a robot who is pushed outside the arena would be disabled. She said yes. When battling for a stack, you must be responsible for keeping yourself inside the field, not your opponents.

71's arm was the best that I saw at Nationals. Period. It was fast and simple. If you had an arm on your bot it was very tough not to have a high center of gravity. In case you strategists haven't figured out by now, a great strategy to stop arm bots is to either 1) put something in the way of the arm such as a robot or 2) go back into them under the bar and push them, if that's possible. #2 may not work on some robots due to the fact that they can't be pushed around easily.

In my opinion, we sorta over-engineered our arm. It was too heavy and too large for the job we wanted it to do. Cudos to 71 :)

Quick re-cap
 

Here is the short version.

We saw 25 line up to come under the bar to push us. We then switched to another little seen auto program that can hit the bins the "conventional" way and then park on top of the ramp. Once on top of the ramp, we are tough to remove. However, Team 25 shot under the bar and just clipped our tail which caused our auto to hit the outside wall. After auto, we were pushed out-of bounds by 25. Even then, it would not have mattered because we had lost a chain during the beating. Our partner ( 522 ) was tipped early and the match was lost. For Wayne: As for looking a "little slow", we all looked slow compared to your team's machine. More amazing than the speed was that the driver had any control at all. While I am not a fan of the strategy, that was the game this year and your team always finds a way to be competitive.

Sincerely,

Brian Beatty

... i like bulldozing the flock


so are you saying that it doesnt take "amazing" engineering ability to create a powerful drive train, along with a universal gearbox

Re: Quick re-cap
 

Ouch.

I think, in your defense, what you probably intended to say was that you didn't like how the rules and gameplay were biased in such a way as to promote their strategy.

I, like you, it seems, had hoped that more robots would do some amazing things with bins, stacks, and multipliers. But, I didn't properly interpret the rules and examine likely scoring scenarios. For that, I'm a fool, not the people who took the simple, straightforward approach and did so well.

could someone please contact me with the requirements on how someone becomes a "natural target" i am avalible through email, aim, and MSN messanger, and yahoo

and to bring this thread WAY off topic, wood was right, everyone complained that there was not enough contact in games like 2001, and now there is too much contact, i dont ever think FIRST will bring a "perfect median" they try to please everyone while making it a Veiwer friendly competition, so with that i thank all the people in first for all either hard work setting this game up

With respect to forum contributions in general:
A “natural target” would be a post where the message was derogated due to a total disregard for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

With respect to my contribution:
A “natural target” would be the one team that may lay claim to three national championships.

Hammond as a "Natural Target" pretty much means that a lot of teams wanted to dethrone them from their back-to-back championships by any means necessary.

Clarification
 

I normally do not comment about replies to my posts as that is the process. But just to clarify my position so there is no misunderstanding. I have been a big fan of team 25 since the 2000 game with their arm--great, original thinking. Just because I am not a "fan" of the strategy does not mean I am upset or disrespect what team 25 and others did. Yes, like every year, the game drove the strategy--the 12 finalist teams looked like a line of Abrahms tanks. We felt that was where the game was going( look at Car Knack predictions ), but our challenge was to design a machine that could compete without being a total tank. If we built a tank, we would have been one of a couple of hundred tanks. We built a very good tank in 2002, but we did not like the game or the strategy necessary to do well. We don't want FIRST to become Battlebots or tank building contests every year--machines are about helping mankind to do bigger and better things. We think the 2001 game was great, although we realize we are in the minority.

In conclusion, my feeling is the challenge for FIRST is to design a game that has "vigorous interaction", but does not let this interaction be the driving component of the game.

Sincerely,

Brian Beatty

Well said, Mr. Beatty. I also loved the 2001 game, and I disliked both this years game, and last years game, because all you needed to do well was a fast or powerful drive train.

FIRST should put more emphasis on dexterity and BUILDING something, as opposed to power, and tearing things down.

The game was called "Stack Attack."

Need I say more?

Re: Clarification
 

And that's what FIRST's all about right there. I challenge all you teams out there... when next year's game comes out... to not resort to an incredibly powerful box. Go against the norm. :)

I believe that FIRST was trying to put more emphasis on dexterity and BUILDING something this year. However the reality of the situation was that stacks were very hard to build quickly and hard to defend.

In other sports, they have years to fine tune the rules to balance the game. We don't have that luxury because the game is different every year.

Like Team 71, our robot had a big arm for hitting the stack. We also had 2 other arms for stacking which saw no action except to push bins. In hind sight, what change to this year's game would have shifted the importance from speed and power to stacking, dexterity, etc.? That could be valuable in helping to make next year's game better. (Maybe that should be a new thread, so I'll start one.)

The problem with this years game was that it was very poorly thought out. The rules were filled with contradictions to what was said on the kickoff video, and it was, in my opinion, a very, very thinly veiled tankbot war.

If FIRST wants a "Thinking Man's Battlebots" game, they found a perfect combo over the past two years. Think about it: all you need is a drive train to score points. You shove bins into zones, you shoved heavy goals into zones. All it is is pushing.

How would you change this year's game (or last year's) to make it better?

(Who knows. Someone may bring up your ideas at one of the post season team forums.)

I regret that I never saw Hammond in action this year. However, some other dominant teams were seeded low at LA, and some nondominant teams were seeded high.

At first, team 60 (Bionic Bulldogs) were seeded low. Some of the mentors and I were talking and we decided that the lack of the flow of bins was the reason. Since 60's strategy was to get to the top and stay there, they did not get much of a total because they did not have any boxes on the opposing teams side. This meant that they did not get much of a doubling from the other side, thus averaging about 100 Qps.

Team 968 (RAWC) were the number 1 seed at LA. We had the privalege of being their alliance partners in one of the qualifying matches along with the elimination rounds. They averaged over 200 QPS, and in the qualifying rounds, we got 240 QPs with them. The reason for this was an excellent strategy of leaving opponents stacks when they did not threaten them, and letting them on top. Letting them on top got them another 50 points, a crutial part on why they won at AZ and were in the finals at LA. Since 60 blocked the entire ramp, they did not get the extra points, unless someone spun them (not likely with their grippers) or climbed on top of them (like we did).

I hope some of this will help you, and answer your question.