Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Just curious...

What are some of the best or strangest defensive techniques that have been seen this year?

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

-knocking over all of the ringers in opponent's homezone to prevent ramp deployment
-parking two bots in homezone to prevent ramp climb (or maybe the radios died. Vegas qf #4 vs #5???? what happened here????:confused: )

bodyguard: instead of the usual 2 offense/1defense, let your defense bot play bodyguard on your leading scorer to keep the other team's defense bot away.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

-Breaking the field to force a match reset.

(Yes it happened, but I'm sure not intentionally.)

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

We had a team playing against us in the elims at Waterloo that deployed their ramp immediately at the start of the match. Our strategy - drive across the field in autonomous and then get underneath their ramp before they deployed. Didn't do a whole lot, but it caused enough confusion to throw the other alliance off...

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Yea that was our partner 2076 in Waterloo, their drive didn't work so they just deployed their huge ramps at the beginning of the match. I believe you guys got under one side of their ramps b4 they deployed them, I don't know how much it threw us off (we didn't really expect them to move :p), but you guys sure gave us a tough time on D.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

There was one time our drive went ahead and pushed a deployed rampbot out of the homezone. It caused the rampbot to get a 20 point penalty and won us the match.

One idea I thought of, but I haven't seen done intentionally would be to pick up a tube and drop it onto of a deployed ramp bot to keep people from climbing up.
Another idea would be to park in front of a deployed rampbot and simply keep their allies from driving up. Sometimes it might be better to take the penalty if it means keeping your opponent from scoring 60 points.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

the penalty is 10 points / bot / 5seconds, during the 15 second endgame. so if the reliable ramp has one-sided access, this might actually make sense assuming that you are leading. otherwise, just go for ringers. 2 bots in the homezone for 15 seconds will negate 2 robots at 12".

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Our human player threw a couple spoilers over the rack into the opponents HZ to try and mess with ramp deploys.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

It appeared to be a Field Malfunction - Radios went out on both of those bots. As you saw, the fog horn was not blown. :(

That was not intentional. If our alliance had not been penalized for those two bots that were waiting to hear from an operator, we almost certainly would have won the match and gone on to play a 3rd QF match to decide which alliance would have advanced.

Blake

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

The best strategy that our team came up with is for ramp/lift bots like ours. We like to call it offensive Defense. There are times when your alliance is up against killer ring placers...ones that can get a ringer under heavy defense and all! Instead of trying to race around the rack trying to beat them (which you can't do) cap the ends of the rack. In SD most commonly the center spider was what was fought over and so try and place ringers on the center level on opposite sides so that the max row horizontally a team can get is 3 or 4 which makes it so that a 60 point lift wins the match every time! Good Luck

-Martin
Team 1717 D'Penguineers

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Erm, you can't do that. The Q&A covered that one even before regionals started. A team can't be forced into a penalty by an opposing team. So while what's done is done, don't expect that to work in Atlanta. Especially against teams that know the rules.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

ahaha the field reset. I remember I think it was SD, team 294 had their arm working and this one time they just drove by the siderail of the field and they turned the robot around and knocked over the radio tower. the refs paused the game for a few min until the fixed that and then they just said "go" casually and everyone continued driving again...

i think the best technique is to make the other alliance think they're keeping u from a lift by keeping u on their side when you're actually keeping them from lifting.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

-Knocking down the tubes on the wall as human element tosses spoilers to the other side to make no room for ramp deployment within home zone(Team 2250 and our human element at Colorado Regional)
-defensive bot playing defense on the opposing defense bot(1583 during final match at Colorado Regional)
-bots who played offense all Friday went on defense on Saturday, completely messed up the other alliance strategy because the last three of our matches, our opposing alliances' strategy was defend against 1636, well we didn't play offense, we went on defense, confused them enough to tie the last three matches.(Us at Colorado Regional)

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

By FAR:
- Placing tubes on opponents ramps. It renders many ramps useless or takes too much time to take off the ramp. We thought it didnt count in Boston (read the Q&A thinking that it meant if the RAMP were resting on a tube... not a robot on a tube on the ramp)

And in the same match in Boston:
- Without "Grabbing", a team slid part of their gripper under the ramp and tried to flip the ramp up, knowing the other team only had one chance to deploy it.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

that was a fun match. I was so surprised they just let us keep going.

Hey hey hey.... you don't have to keep rubbing it in :rolleyes: .

It was a brilliant strategy though, especially us keeping beachbots from getting back in the 1st match cemented our win... It was natural to think I was doing it again... Well, its true what they say about strategy I guess.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

In the same link they also state that if the blue team does not return to the home zone they will be given the appropriate penalty. They(our drive team) weren't even thinking about the penalty at the time I don't think, they just wanted to make it so the other team couldn't get up the ramps. The penalty was just sort of a side effect.

Edit: Now that I think about it I don't recall if they actually received a penalty or if it was simply the other team not getting up the ramp that won it for us.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

this year in the quarter finals at st louis we were up against a ramp bot that started oriented so that there partners had to enter from outside the end zone so i basically just went and parked the robot at the end of that ramp and sat there they didn't score we won.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

I drove for my team at UC Davis,
We did "body Guard"
and teams tried to knock over rings in our home zone, but we cleared them, that has never worked, also teams tried to park against our side to stop our ramp from deploying, also that did not work, we deployed and one side fell down, that side got lifted, when they moved the other side fell down and we lifted that side also.

I've also seen teams just get in front of the rack on the opponents side and block teams from scoring, although I don't know how effective that was.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

I am personally a fan of trying to shake the rack enough so the other alliance can't score. Doing this in autonomous mode is even better.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

That happened in Las Vegas, interestingly enough, it was a pretty good autonomous round for our alliance.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Be wary, though. 829 does this, and at BMR, they got stuck. Spent pretty much the rest of the match trying to unstick themselves.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

yeah, the break was not intentional. if you guys watched all of the other qualifyings, we were just driving forward and swinging our arm over. that autonomous was written after lunch on saturday, and modified between matches. i was pretty hopeful that we'd get to play that one over, because that 1425 ringer was too sweet. oh well, you guys had us outclassed.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

ones that win :yikes:

there is not one way of winning

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Whatever strategy helps my alliance most :cool:

Seriously, there are so many ways to win this year that there is no best strategy, it's all based on the robots that are in play and on the situation out on the field.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

There was a team at Las Vegas that grabbed a spoiler in the opening seconds of the match and then played defense the rest of the match, not ever really trying to score the spoiler. It confused the opposition the first few times.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

As far as the non-"grabbing" of the Queen's ramp in that match, I still believe that intentional entanglement should have been called. If not that, then at least intentional outside the bumper zone contact. The arm in question was put underneath the ramp and attempted to lift/push the ramp. I did not like the call on this; however, I think it really didn't play much into the results of the match, just wasting the time of the offending robot.


As far as interesting strategy, some on our team though of pushing any early deploying one-sided ramps ramp-first to the end of the home zone. If the ramp and platforms are on the sides of the robot and there is no swerve/holonomic/meccanum drive, the robot cannot reposition without either raising the lift mechanism or risking 72" penalties.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Ya, that was our team. We scored it once or twice i think, and it does cause some confusion with the other team. We tried it Week 1 at Portland and had 2 other robots focus in on us while our teammates scored. Works pretty well.

-Zach Wydick

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

To add to zach's comment. Yeah that was us, and we scored the spoiler three times during the quarters, semi's, finals... then we also almost scored it another time on an empty spider leg, but we were able to get it off and keep going with it... that was pretty interesting. Holding the spoiler made it easier to block more area because we have a stationary arm with a rotating jaw (grabber). In portland it was like a magnet, we were automatically double teamed everytime we took out a spoiler, giving our alliance partners free reign over the rack. In vegas that didn't happen quite as often, but as I said, it gave us more blocking power, and we could score the spoiler when the time came for it. All in all worked pretty well.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Since our robot seems to play a defensive role even though it can score well, I think I'll be adding the "skunkworks spoiler" to my bag of tricks for galileo.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

I hope it works well for you. Just remember to pose a threat and not wander around aimlessly lol

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

hey that's a good name for it! and it follows our colors too, how about that... :D It's all in the black and white... let us know how it works out for you...

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

I know team 1425 appreciated it.:D

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Actually, if an alliance partner is nearby to score over the spoiler (that is on a leg by itself) this can be a good thing. The ringer on the outside of the spoiler counts and the spoiler on the inside makes the leg full (and thus not spoilable). The inside spoiler can't be removed because doing so would require descoring the ringer - so you have a situation that is equivilant to a keeper. I wouldn't expect this situation to arise very often.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

We applied three tactics at Palmetto, in descending order of use:

1) Get between them and the rack. When we're one of the faster robots out there (which appeared to be often), this is not especially hard.
2) Clip a corner (or the end of a side, your choice). You don't have to move the whole robot, just enough to throw them off course.
3) Textbook brute-force pushing match. Sometimes, you just wind up in a textbook pushing match. Sometimes, you even win.

Not imaginative, but it was enough for a robot with a bad arm (and, in nearly two qualification matches, a dead drive system) to seed 12th and pick.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

We run up and smack a spider foot, back up and do it again. Makes the entire rack really start swinging. We call it "Smack the Rack" defense and it was pretty effective until we got stuck in the Quarter finals :rolleyes:

The foot went in the gap in our ramp and actually got stuck on the bar that runs between the lift cams. Our driver worked for over a minute to get unstuck and finally with a push from our Puerto Rican friends managed to get us free.

BTW That gap will no longer be there at The Championship.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Team 1975 is a ramp bot without a drive train. They flip over in the beginning of the match and wait for their partners to drive up them. We played them in one of our qualifiers. While we were tubing, we had our partners go attempt to push them out of the home zone, considering once they were out they most likely couldnt get back in. Moral of the story was...they were unmovable...I believe we still won the match tho.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

This was the purpose of our robot, to be a small qnd fast robot that could play defense and harrass the opposition and then speed home and climb or be lifted for 30 pts. If you saw "Mini-me" in action you would be impressed.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

That's a good point... we may look into that for future use... It would have to be quick though so the opposing alliance couldn't get there first... hmmmm...

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Teams tried that on us. Didn't work haha. It takes like 2 seconds to clear them out.

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

well some of the arm bots were arm heavy so we just spun their light side

we got between them and the rack and we also had a big tarp thing to keep them from scoring from over us.

who knew castor bots could be so powerful? :D

vivek

Re: Best/Strangest Defense Techniques
 

Um....we went went with the Aluminum Magnet option this year...:D LoL