Quote:
Originally Posted by 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).
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As a member of 1678's scouting/strategy team I can vouch for this. Really the only decision we made in the einstein finals this year was where to put our inbounder, either at the start of our cycle, or after the truss shot. Seeing as we wanted to be able to get the triple assist no matter what while under defense that was too heavy for trussing it was the obvious choice to put 1640 at the start of out cycle so that we already had 2 assists as soon as the ball entered the field.
In 2013 we had much more to consider and we played many different strategies throughout each match. 862 was largely on defense in almost every match as their superior driving ability was most valuable there. However, they also played counter defense to protect 148 while they lined up for the FCS, and even ran cycles on occasion. 148 had to be able to both FCS and run cycles. 1678 had to play defense and counter defense along with 862 to slow down the opposition and to protect 148 lining up for the FCS and also be able to switch off to picking up discs off the floor to either starve our opponents, or to put in discs that 148 had missed. In 2013 each robot played many more unique roles. However that's not to say 2014 didn't have strategic depth, it just didn't have the amount of depth that 2013 had.
This doesn't even consider how many more options you had to consider in 2013 for alliance selection. This year was basically choosing an inbounder/defense, a midfielder, and a finisher that was either an open field or a fender shooter. In 2013 there were countless different options to consider when choosing alliance partners ranging from defense, to FCS, to climbing, to scoring colored discs, to cycler, to ground pick up, etc...