Quote:
Originally Posted by thenomnivore
On your opinion with changing my teams look, the whole reason we are changing that aspect is because we don't have that strong of a presence during the competition. It currently makes it hard for people to find us actually xD
What do you mean by your team plays the game specifically?
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I can't speak to what 111 does, but, for us, it means running through every scenario we can think of happening...and then more.
So for this year's game, you'd try to think of everything that could happen. What happens if one team crosses the bump to play defense? What if none of your alliance partners can get the bridge down? What happens if they try to starve your alliance of balls? If there are balls stuck in the corner, can you get them? What about under the bridge? How are you going to line up your shots? What if someone pushes you? Is a turret worth it? What if your partner falls over/stops moving in front of your bridge? Are you able to cross the bump and get on from the other side? Would you be able to shoot over another robot in front of you? Then you think of how you could better your design to deal with these issues. Of course, don't get caught up on solving every single problem. Don't try to do too much, but you also don't want to have to rely on a specific set of circumstances for your machine to perform well. This year, we focused mainly on being an effective shooter. Thankfully for us, we use more or less the same drive train each year so we already knew climbing the ramp and crossing the bump wasn't going to be a huge challenge for us.
One example of when "playing the game" benefitted us:
Looking back this seems obvious, but many people designed their robots to shoot only from the fender. Now, that's fine against teams who can't cross the bump or drive over the bridge (or elect not to), but what happens when you face that defense? We took this into consideration and designed our robot to shoot from both the key and the fender. At the start of the season, you'll probably notice we primarily shot from the fender. As teams wised up to this and started playing more aggressive defense, we were able to adapt to that and back up to the key. And we didn't have to change our machine at all because we had already planned for that.