Quote:
Originally Posted by connor.worley
I don't know why people say this game has strategic depth, especially when it comes to elims. It was more or less 3 typecasted robots trying to do the same thing over and over as fast as possible with defense inbetween. Some neat assisting techniques involving passing the ball back to the human player came out, but they were just a way to speed up the same old process.
|
In 8 years, I've never understood how people attribute strategic depth to
games at all. In my mind, strategic depth is a function of the teams; any year* can be a high-speed grandmaster chess game in the right hands. I'd pay to see Paul Copioli and Karthik develop deep strategy for competitive phone book reading.
As far as the actual pre-match exchanges, they're always very patterned. That's not to say they're not creative, but I didn't find this year to be particularly spectacular in terms of cooperation. Positions/flexibility? Inbound (direction, load vs floor range)? 3rd assist as inbound or post-truss (kiss, 12d, bounceback, floor)? 2 assist and truss skip guidelines? Auto balls, spots, cleaner(s)? Defense keys by position (range/spot and angles, forcing drops/misses, pass/HP bottlenecks)? There's more to the decisions and details, but the strategic vocabulary isn't stand-out to me this year.
I feel like people who recall last year as not being collaborative have forgotten, e.g., what it took to get really fast and robust traffic flow. The communication and field reading required this year are very similar to what ensured the most synergistic 2013 alliances were cycling such that the right robot was in the right place as the right time for defense that makes opponents lose more than you do for the time commitment...in the middle of your own offense, while simultaneously not inhibiting your other 2 teams doing the same. And that's just if it was 3 cyclers (for example).
Games don't require or provide strategic depth; they allow for it. How much they overtly encourage it may vary, but the actual payoff doesn't change much. Synergistic strategies with feasible executions will always be trump cards in the arena.
*any year, you know, e.g. 2008, 2010, 2011...