[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Andy Grady

Good post, but naturally I am going to disagree with one thing. You stated that you can't believe the number of people who are in favor of defensive strategy, and that winning alliances usually have 3 strong offensive robots. I feel that history actually states that it is not so one sided...

Lets look back at the world champions of the years since I've been in the program and rate them either offense or defense depending on what won it for them.

1995 - Defense - In Ramp n Roll, if you didn't play defense, you wouldn't take the mountain to make the best score. Raychem and Woodside won by knocking Gael Force down the hill and playing catch up.

1996 - Offense - Tigerbolt scored a perfect score in each of its final matches.

1997 - Offense - Beatty's cap ability and tube scoring were unmatched...though Delphi's goal block did win them a match...which is more than anyone else could say about facing Beatty that year

1998 - Offense - Technokat's roller claw was offensive.

1999 - Defense - Juggernauts and Aces high used pushing power and strength to bowl their way to the top of the puck for the multipliers...and defended the top of it to the best of their ability.

2000 - Defense - A resounding defense on this one as the finalists team 25 Raider Robotix and 131 CHAOS used purely defensive ball stealing strategy to roll through the best offensive robots.

2001 - n/a - 4 v 0

2002 - Offense - Beatty just grabbed 3 goals and walked to a championship

2003 - Defense - Wildstang would bowl its way to the top of the mountain and defend it with its double wedge design.

2004 - Defense - One word...Martians

2005 - Offense - Went completely offensive...lots of scoring.

2006 - Offense - Autonomous and hoarding of balls from the human player won it all.

2007 - Defense - A heavily defensive alliance overwhelmed a more high powered offensive alliance and relied on the bonus at the end and a well placed tube to block a ramp.

2008 - Offense - Defense was heavily restricted

2009 - Offense - Turrets and fast delivery systems would take the day.

2010 - Defense - With all due respect to 177 and 67, that alliance does not beat the high powered scoring machine of 1114, 469, and 2041 without the amazing defensive, ball clearing effort of 294.

I see 8 - 7 in favor of offense...not really definitive if you are trying to determine which way to go each year.

With that said...I will go on the record as agreeing with you about this year. For the first time ever, I am thinking complete offensive domination is the way to go!

Good luck teams!

Emphasis mine.
I totally agree with this as the main reason they won the World Championships. When we won IRI this year with 469 and 330, we could not figure out why the opposing alliances didnt spend more time getting the balls out of their far zone back to their middle or near? The other alliances in the semis and finals clearly had better offensive machines, but I saw successful blocks a lot rather than kick a lot out of the zones.