Re: "Playing Cheap"
 

There is no such thing as playing Cheap. However their is such thing as playing smart. There are not many ways to score points this year. Its either hang for 50 points or push balls to the human player. From the looks of the robots many teams took the HANG path.

I say let them hang if they wanna. Let them clear the path for your alliance to score the balls!!! (HINT HINT)

Re: "Playing Cheap"
 

i believe that no alliance scored 180 at the PNW regional, but two alliances scored 170. I forgot one, but the other alliance was 492 and 1031.

Re: "Playing Cheap"
 

My team (team 492) did not try to hang at all and did amazingly well. We placed 1st in the seeding round and the aliance lead by us took the gold. As you may have guesed we picked 2 hangers as our aliance partners so as to distribute the + qualities throught our alliance. Hanging was not needed to be good, and many of the teams tryed just to hand and failed. We did everything BUT hang, so its not really cheap if you can do it but still not even win...

Re: "Playing Cheap"
 

"6) remember that most of the time, simpler is better. I have watched many matches where the big fancy robot that does everything looses to a little tiny robot that only does one thing. Look at the top seed in BAE, Team 501 only hanged, and they did it well."

Just a correction, team 501 was the top seed at BAE but they not only hung, they had a great large ball system that allowed them to steal the mobile goal, place it under their troff, fill it and cap it within 30 seconds....then they hung. Hanging alone would not have been enough in most of their matches.

Re: "Playing Cheap"
 

I'm just glad to see that FIRST learned their lesson from last year, when the game turned into a battle for the ramp and not a stacking competition. They have done a much better job assigning points this year. Last year, staking bots had no chance against king of the hill bots. But this year, both bar domination and ball collecting seem like effective strategies.