Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard
How does your team determine what gameplay at the highest levels is going to look like?
How does this shape your robot design, your strategic decisions, your scouting and picklisting, etc?
Why does it feel like the games sometimes aren't pushed to their limits?
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Once we've kind of read through the rules and understood the flow of the gameplay, we do a simulation. We will go to our cafeteria, use the game pieces and similar objects, and get students to move around like robots and play a match for 2 minutes. We'll then run through a couple of specific scenarios (like timing cycle time in 2013) and kind of extrapolate those results to determine our initial bot's goals. We try to phrase things like "we need to be able to do x in y time" as goals for our build. This goes a long way in our strategy discussion. This kind of initial analysis usually sets our goals for week 1 competition, sometimes further. We essentially push our design to reach and exceed the simulation times for scoring.
As far as why we don't see games pushed to their limit: It's tough for teams, even at championships, to play synchronized with eachother to push the game to their limit. Things happen, and sometimes 3 amazing teams just don't work as well with eachother on the field, even if individually they are all amazing.