Quote:
Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14
My question, mostly to teams that attempted this but also to those who considered it, is why did you find this strategy successful or unsuccessful?
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We found the strategy very successful for multiple reasons.
First of all, we owe a great debt to 1114’s Effective FIRST Strategies guide. Our goal before the season was to find a simple and effective approach to scoring following 1114’s golden rules. Apparently the Game Design Committee had a different plan.
We knew a disc shooting robot would have a higher scoring potential and therefore be a “better” strategy. But we didn’t know if we were capable of building that machine our first year. Climbing and dumping would still give us a very high score without the strain of prototyping disc shooters and queuing systems. We dedicated all our efforts to climbing hoping the dumper would be easy. (As it turned out, dumping was a bit trickier than I first imaged.)
We knew the scoring potential of our strategy put us in almost certain position to make regional elimination rounds. We also felt climbing and dumping would be a great complementary robot to a shooter making it harder for the opposing alliance to pick someone to defend. Making in the top 8 twice was a pleasant but slightly unexpected bonus. Getting picked by 125 and playing with 233 at Orlando was a blast!
Ultimately this strategy, or our performance, wasn’t strong enough to make the elimination rounds on Newton. We added some defense to our Newton game plan, but I agree that our scoring cap, low autonomous output, and all-or-nothing scoring was the key limiting factor. I was very happy to see 190 make eliminations with a similar robot. They played great and had a better autonomous scoring potential than our robot. Well done!
Here’s the real success story to the strategy. We also knew a climber / dumper would differentiate us and bring more visibility to our program in the FRC community (hopefully not the spectacular failing kind.) This success also gave us greater exposure in the school and community. As a result, we’ve had more students apply for the team this season than we can handle.
There’s more to this game than robots.
David