Sorry if I’m reviving a settled topic… but I feel the need to defend death cycles (warning: super biased perspective incoming)
. It wasn’t so much that death cycles were hard to build for (our robot was painfully simple: catapult + wheels, no pickup required) or hard to qualify for champs with. I would think obscurity killed the concept more than anything. And even so, it almost happened! A 900+1918 alliance totally could have been made in Archimedes (single tear… If only we had been the 8th alliance’s second pick. << come to think of it, that’s a very rare kind of statement in FRC).
I’d argue that the component bots of death cycles were plenty competitive on their own. At defense-heavy regionals, an undefendable trusser might have been a huge asset for the top scorers (pure speculation from a North Carolinian here). Scoring from in front of the low goal in and of itself was also of great value for some excellent high-gaolers.
Case in point: When 900 saw the trussing component of death cycles, suddenly no other strategy held a candle, even though we were aiming for regionals, not champs. We weren’t even thinking about the ultimate partners because, well …. North Carolina (no offense to NC teams, please don’t hurt me!); the benefits to cycle speed of truss to human player alone were enough to convince us.
I would think the digging required to figure out death cycles is what kept the components from popping up, and, by extension, the concept’s fulfillment; teams would need to have realized that defense would be killer, cycle speed would be super important, and that human players could catch truss shots. Most teams willing to be that observant were, by no coincidence, great teams anyway, and so they didn’t need to pursue niche roles.
What I’m curious about is if the possibility/value of death cycles had not been so obscure (i.e. the rulebook said plainly “you can totally throw over the truss straight to the human player” and/or the animation video warned that plowie could kick the crud out of guys on the field) if things might have been different. Do you all think more teams might have pursued the components of death cycles, or by extension, that death cycles might have been more or fully realized?