YES defense changes again in the eliminations, and can be played in a big way against a high-powered alliance. The first Final's match our alliance was way off-balance, everyone was trying too hard trying to out score them on tubes, we scored in the wrong order, ran into each other etc. causing major confusion even on my part. Mean time, our human players were tossing tubes to the opposition and making it easy for them to score. Someone posted earlier about Human Player discipline- absolutely! Don't get too excited & throw the game away because you want to do something!
Thanks to some great scouting/strategic advice from our friends 2337, in the Kettering Finals we switched to a stronger defensive posture in our 2nd match and had our alliance been able to shut 33's mini-bot down & deployed our own (we only had 1 on our alliance, 494's) we might have went to a 3rd match. It was certainly much better played than going point-point, even if we took out the confusion factor.
I have to agree with the earlier post, but will gear it more toward an alliance. Going forward, for an alliance to be highly competitive, scoring 2 or 3 ubertubes in auton, (can anyone score from the middle in auton, aside from 33, 148 doing a double... I see an opportunity if done correctly) and having at least 2 mini-bots for flexibility will be "must-haves". Execution on placing tubes is a given, do right, do it efficiently.
As for the "best gripper", active rollers are good, but so are claws (if your design ensures you get a good bite every time- we did not & it made it tougher especially when everyone gets excited during elims)
Load station... what load station? Never used it once, though we designed our arm to be able to use it, other-wise we would have used a 4-bar variation and made life a little easier. We didn't get our arm working effectively until late Saturday & it as well as the controls still have room for improvement.
Good luck to everyone competing in week #2!
