[Lil' Lavery]

Perhaps there should be a distinction made between "strategy" and "tactics." While the "strategic" meta-game of highly competitive matches settled into 50-point cycles with trussing to the human player, that glosses over a lot of the finer detail tactical differences between alliances. The amount of robot-robot interaction, both in terms of assists/offense and defense was greater than any game in memory (even 2007 and 2009), and it led to a great deal of robot-specific tactical decisions, many of which evolved late in the season.

For instance, look at how assists were gathered. While the default method was one robot would pick up the ball and spit it out on the ground towards another, there was plenty of variance from that. "Kiss passing" was popular from essentially the beginning of the season, but not every robot could accomplish that easily (especially if your intake had to stick out dramatically to accumulate or release a ball). A number of robots had specific methods for passing to each other, like arm bots dropping a ball directly into an open hopper or what amounted to hand-off between bots with comptabale gripping mechanisms. Late in the season a new method emerged; consisting of quickly passing the ball back to the human player immediately after an inbound, and having that human player throw it to a second robot. This was used plenty during qualifications at MAR champs (as far as I can tell 1089 was the first team to use this), but really gained popularity in St. Louis, to the point where two different Einstein alliances (2590 with Archimedes and 973 with Galileo) used this method to rapidly register an assist without much risk of losing a ball.

You can find similar distinctions defensively, as well. 1712 developed different methods of harassing various inbounders, based on their machine's design. If a team didn't establish firm control of a ball during an inbound, we knew that a well-timed impact could knock the ball loose before they registered a possession. Others we opted to keep away from the inbounding position, since it was difficult to load them at range. Team 2590 could use their arm to disrupt pass-through inbounding and kiss pass attempts. Team 118 used their height to disrupt 254 from being able to score. 1625's swerve (tank?) and drive team were able to punish 33 for their drivetrain selection during the Archimedes finals.

There are plenty of examples of robot-specific match-up that opened new tactical options in this game, plenty more than I've seen in most recent games. Ultimate Ascent was pretty much limited to blocking lower release point full court shooters (or a rare attempt at blocking pyramid shooters), otherwise was limited to pushing matches and parallel play. You didn't really tailor your tactical decisions based on machine characteristics, beyond how many discs a team could score.