Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
Strategy.
I don't care if someone wins all their matches or none of their matches. If there is something that they do well, and that complements my team's strategy, if they're around when my team is picking, they won't be around much longer. If there's a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none robot around that does everything but does not do it well, they're probably going to be available a while longer.
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Absolutely. Our picks were based off of our data and our empirical evaluations of teams at our scouting meeting. 548 had an auton that had succeeded 100% of their matches during qualifications, and had a good minibot, as well as a good roller claw to deliver tubes to us. They also had a track record, this year, of really coming to play after not-always-spectacular qualifications showings. Unfortunately, the unthinkable happened: That 100% autonomous failed twice in a row. In the grand scheme of things, even success in their autonomous would not have won the second match of the quarterfinals for us, but the first match
could have been won with the extra ubertube.
A bit of a tangent: Strategy dictates EVERYTHING on our team. Strategy runs the team, from robot design to match play. That is our team's mantra. The way that we performed at Championship, at Troy, at Ann Arbor, and at Kettering was due to our strategy. And you're absolutely right: we make our picks based not solely off of data, but also based on what parts of the robot are strong. We've said at every competition this year that we want our third pick to be "Our Juggernauts," (For those of you who don't know, Team 1 was almost at the very bottom of the rankings at Kettering in Week One, got picked by the #1 alliance captained by the Killer Bees, and then were so fantastic at "throwing" tubes into the Bees'/TORCs' scoring zone that they might have decided the competition). It doesn't matter about how many points you score in a match, what your seed is, or anything like that: what matters to us is what a robot's capabilities are and whether or not they will complement our strategy.
I can say with great confidence that winning Troy and Ann Arbor was the direct result of our strategy. Unfortunately, we got slightly unlucky at Championship, but I feel slightly less bad about being eliminated in the quarterfinals considering we were in a division that yielded the World Champions.