Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

Assuming the following:
Ignore the Qualification Matches, these strategies are only for Elimination, where winning means something.
Assume you can pick any alliance within reason. (i.e. a middle-long range bot+ a defender + a herding bot would be a possible team makeup.)

What were the most effective strategies that you have seen played out?

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

You should probably change the title of the thread too Breakaway Elimination Strategy so it doesn't look like you are going over other strategy threads that have already made.

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

In our elimination matches, we went with a standard one robot in each zone setup for almost all cases. The alliance of 217, 1551 and 174 who won the championship, would start out one in each zone, then after 217 shot their balls in autonomous, 174 and 217 would switch places, allowing 217 to continue racking up points. The main strategy to emerge as successful was one strong midfielder with good abilities deflecting balls, an efficient scorer, and a defensive robot to assist the midfielder and slow down the opposition. It also helped to have a hanging robot in the alliance to save a close game at the end.
To defeat 217, 1551, and 174, we switched our formation to one offense and two midfielders, allowing us to box out 1551 and deny 217 balls long enough for us to even the score.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

An interesting fact, 174 could only push balls, and it was REALLY GOOD AT IT!

I can't personally comment on strategy during elimination, due to the fact that when our alliance played, two of our alliances robots were offline.
What seemed to work well for other teams was to have your fastest robot in the defending zone, because if they could out-maneuver the offending robot, then it was almost impossible to score.

Another thing, hanging was highly situational, based on the amount of balls in the offensive zone.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

Scoring more points than the other team.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

I disagree. Playing good defense was just as, or more important.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

E-M-P . . .:yikes:


However, in all seriousness I agree that it would serve wise to have a very strong defense in the far zone. A highly maneuverable robot would possess the qualities necessary to deny the opposing alliance any soccer balls to score.

In BAE 1073 and their alliance reigned victorious over 78 and their alliance members through the aid of this tactic. 78 was in their own near zone and attempting to score. However, whenever their vacuum would gain possession of a soccer ball, the defending robot would tap/ram (perspective) them so they lost hold of the game piece. Hence, denying them from successfully scoring much needed points.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

So let me get this straight...in the elimination rounds you do not agree with scoring more points than the other alliance? Well, I'll be dammed...that's one heck of a strategy.

In finals, we *tried* to do what everyone else did, that is one defender in far zone, one ball relayer in the middle and a consistent scorer in the near zone, but all three positions were very poorly executed and therefore we took hard losses.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

I can tell you the best strategy is to not have one strategy. The only loss we took was due to us not changing our strategy when dictated by the other alliance's play. The 1511/3157 alliance changed their strategy and we did not adjust. We learned this lesson and had a few "option" strategies based on how they defended us.

The elimination round version of this game is very exciting.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

It would be nice if the whole game was like the elims.
Who know? Maybe people would actually enjoy watching qualification matches!:ahh: (WHAT A REVELATION!!!!)
Ah well, there's always the off season.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

I see quite alot of people here from FLR...
See ya at Ruckus!

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

Haha, many times it was a lighter ram due to our driver trying to get away from 134 (they are REALLY good at defense), but most of the time all three robots (two red one blue) were together as a group making it impossible for balls to be shot. We have a picture that they sent to us with them pushing our robot and we have two wheels on the ground. With two strong drive trains going at it, you will have airborne robots. :D

Our strategy was very plain. One bot in each zone, one defense two offense.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

Please do come.
It's 24 (or more) or bust this year!

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

In reference to alliance structure for the eliminations a good structure seems to be this:

Striker: The Robot that plays in your scoring zone. They should be fast, agile, be able to take defense, and be well driven. They DO NOT have to have a kicker. They just need to be very efficient at getting the balls on the floor of the scoring zone into the goal.

Mid-Fielder: This Robot plays in the middle of the field. Once the match starts, all balls flow out from the mid-field (ball return), and I found that if you can control the midfield you can control the match. This robot should be reasonably fast, have a strong drive base, good ball control, and a decent kicker. It's a bonus if this bot can hang because it's already close to the tower. This robot's kicking and ball handling mechanism should be the best on the alliance IMO, because in some cases scoring from the midfield is very important if your bot in the scoring zone is d-ed up. This robot should also have an autonomous that can get balls out of this zone. Your Mid-Fielder also needs to be able to get out of this zone to score in the scoring zone if need be.

Defensive Bot/Goalie: This robot plays in the opponents home zone. This bot should have a strong drivebase, a powerful kicker (Kicking across both bumps is best) and good ball handling. This machine is responsible for clearing the scoring zone of your opponent and bringing the balls down to their scoring zone. The kicker here doesn't NEED to be super accurate although it is Preferred. This robot also needs an autonomous mode capable of clearing some or all of the balls out of the opponents zone.

This is also based entirely around playing the game in a certain manner. You get as many balls as possible down into your scoring zone using the mid-fielder and "goalie" and then the striker is responsible for cleaning up any missed shots. In some matches this won't work well because of other factors but it's a good base strategy. In many cases the Goalie will need to move up an assist the mid-fielder to keep strong control there.

But this is just my two cents so feel free to disagree.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

We will defiantly be attending this year, as we have for the last few. Wasn't it 25 in '09?

It's a little off-topic, but how do the X-Cats manage to attend so many events?
You guys are going to like, 5 regionals!

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

No they're not.
I am.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

My team, 1922, and our alliance members, 319 and 78, tried abandoning the defensive zone after 1922 had kicked up the balls. 78 would than also move up to the offensive position. It worked well against weaker alliances but in the finals we could not move the balls out of the mid field zone against 1519 and 1073.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

@Koko Ed

OOOOH! So thats why your Blue Alliance page disagrees with your siggy. Now it makes sense!

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

I'm going to go out on a limb, and claim that the winning alliance on Einstein is going to be a team with the exact capabilities as the FLR winners 1551, 217 and 174, with the only difference being either 217 or 174 can also hang at the same near 100% consistency that 1551 did.

And I'll be very honest, if there was any alliance that would have defeated 1551, 217 and 174, it would have been 578, 3157, and 1511. If 1511 could use their hanger, it would have been curtains for the Grape Chicken Warriors.

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

Wow, that's quite a compliment. O_O
To be honest, though, we (well, at least a few of us on 217) were almost positive that we were going to lose to 188, 610, and 191 in the finals. And I must say, if we get anywhere close to that level of competition at any of our districts, or even MSC, I will be very happy. That was an epic match, and I'd like to thank all of the competitors - both the Arctic Chickens of Wrath and the other alliance (the X-Coyote Blizzards, maybe?). Good luck to everyone in your other competitions, and I hope every team gets to experience that level of excitement where the teams are so evenly matched!

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

X-Blizzard Coyotes sound better.

What made 217, 188 and 610 so dangerous is they can score from anywhere on the field and are difficult to defend. I expect to see all three robots down in Atlanta making alot of noise.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

In my opinion, the only thing missing from either of the the two teams at FLR finals was the ability to score in the offensive zone, besides pushing. Dont get me wrong, pussing is a good strategy, but most of the robots had a very long range kicker.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

Genius! Why didn't I think of that.

Re: Breakaway Strategy
 

you guys did a great job at flr and had an awesome alliance i had a feeling you guys would be the winning alliance with your kicker and 1551s hanger and 174 on defense and good luck in traverse kettering and atlanta best of luck

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

While our team did a lot of very good defense (on the San Diego winning alliance with 359 and 100), I would like to see 294 do more of this strategy:

Start autonoumous in the far field and kick all three balls to the near field. Then ignore the opposing robot there in the far end and climb into the midfield. Now with two ally bots in the midfield, all the returned balls (only one from the enemy) get fed to our near zone scorer. If they defend him in the nearfield, climb into the near field and help clean up. This strategy applies to both quals and elims.

Re: Breakaway Elimination Strategy
 

defense: Like Rick said, we found that The defense robot should first clear all the balls from it's zone(needs a good kicker to get it into the scoring zone). Then, depending on the situation, either help control the balls at midfield, or stay at defense I'd the other alliances robot was superb at scoring.

The midfield robot needs to have a relatively accurate kicker to either score or get the ball into position to score. It also needs relatively good ball control so it can control the balls from the ball return or a way for balls to bounce off and into the scoring zone(we had a houselike structure that deflected balls sideways and we used that to our advantage. Good pushing power also helps when trying to get the ball from the other alliance

the forward needs to be extremely manueverable and have excellent ball control so it can score going up the ramp. Kicker and hangar are not needed.

Durin the last few seconds and if the situation allowed it, we liked to move all non hanging robots intothe scoring zone. This usually gave our alliance a couple of points if there were enough balls because it would essentially overload the defense of the other alliance.

But again, teams that will win need to adapt and change their strategy every match so they can find the ideal positions for that round. A stagnant strategy is what killed us in finals and looking back, we should have changed it