[Donut]

Originally Posted by ToddF

After some time playing with the simulator, I've concluded that the ideal alliance this year is a dedicated climber and two shooters, one of which can feed directly from the station and the other with great floor pickup.

For the first part of the match, the station feeder just shoots disks downfield. If some of those happen to score, great, but more important is reducing the number of trips to the feeder station to retrieve disks. Last year, good inbounders were able to keep their robots supplied with basketballs, but this year a robot will have to provide that function, at least until the inbounders can throw disks to their robots.

From the simulator, we learned that the real bottleneck to scoring is disk supply. Good scoring robots quickly exhaust the available disks on the floor. Driving to the drivers station to get more is a real time killer, especially if slowed down by any halfhearted attempts at defense.

Think about the problem this way: After teleop, a single robot has 6 disks easily reachable on the floor available for scoring. If limited to getting disks from the feeder station, and generously assuming 5 trips to refill, that is 20 disks more. Any defense that slows down round trips from the feeder station could easily reduce the number of trips to 2 or 3.

For every disk available for scoring, you pay a price for that disk measured in seconds to retrieve it. The highest price you can pay is driving back and forth to get them, and the other alliance can drive the price higher by playing defense. The lowest price you can pay is parking at the feeder station and shooting them downfield. There is an optimum number of disks the inbounding robot would want to shoot downfield. Too many and they will lay on the field un-scored at the end of the match. Too few and the scoring robot(s) will run out and have to go hunting for more.

Was the limited supply of disks (45 per alliance station) ever a factor? I know the simulator may be an overestimate for a typical team's ability but I'm curious if the disk supply matters even for an elite level group.