[JackN]

I am intrigued by people who say this game has more strategic depth than Ultimate Ascent, mainly because I see the polar opposite when I look at the two games. The difference could come in definition of the word but lets think about this.

Aerial Assist had two viable strategies for alliances to pursue. These played out in the finals with the 1678/1114/1640 alliance vs the 254/469/2848 alliance. One alliance was simply making two passes and scoring to limit the danger of putting a ball in the air and having two inbounds. The other was making two passes and added a truss shot. Outside of those two options you had a one niche strategy of the one pass+truss+score. Now the in match actions of robots were very important, I will agree and each individual robot needed to act on their own and make decisions, but those decisions were seldom more than can I go pass or should I play defense.

Ultimate Ascent went in a very different way. Look at the four Einstein alliances from 2013. I would argue all four of them attempted to do very different things. The 33/469/1519 alliance attacked by using two full court shooters to flood the field with frisbees and then using their floor pickups to sweep up the missed shots, the 1241/1477/610 alliance just effectively ran cycles and played the odds that their opponents would miss more shots doing fancy things, the 1678/148/862 alliance had two defenders and one full court shooter and the 1640/303/3476 alliance attempted to do everything on the field with a 30 pt hang+FCS+cycles. Saying that the game lacked depth or that it was just watching teams running cycles is very reductionist.

I thought Aerial Assist was an ok game that had potential and good moments, but on the whole lacked the variety of some of the better games in FRC history. It was more hated on than it should be, but I would rank it in the bottom half of games that I have participated in (all of them since 2005).