[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

As for step totes, I'll be straight, I have no idea why you thought they were important at all. Did you think seven stacks from the HP and / or landfill wouldn't be enough?

Actually, yeah, I did.
My assumption for the best alliance in the world at the beginning of build season was:
Human Player Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the human player station
Landfill Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the landfill
Capper; Capable of capping 5-7 stacks
I figured the best landfill robots in the world would be able to make stacks out of upside-down or step totes to come up with the extra landfill stacks.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

First I want to say that this is something a lot of teams "called wrong" in the sense that they spent some design effort on being able to perform catches when they really didn't need to. Teams like 254, 2056, 469, 1114, 118, etc. all came out of the gate with catching features on their robots. However, these teams all properly evaluated the game and determined that this task was the lowest priority. This decision meant that other game tasks drove their design and catching was more tacked on at the end.

The choice to make catching a lower priority was fairly obvious from the game layout. In a cycle game, what's less important than points per cycle is the overall rate of scoring. Catching adds 10 points to a cycle, enough that five catching cycles is the equivalent of six non catching cycles. Six cycles in roughly 2 minutes is roughly 20 seconds a cycle; five cycles is roughly 25 seconds a cycle. Does a good catch add less than 5 seconds to a cycle? Defense on both sides of the equation, the relatively narrow target for the ball to land in, the swiftness and ease of trussing in the vague general direction of the undefendable human player, all of these factors worked against catching from the beginning. Properly identifying the truss to human player strategy, the somewhat awkward role of a second-assist midfield robot, and being realistic about defense are what was necessary to see that catch just wasn't going to happen. (Stop trying to make catch happen!)

Catching was lower on our priority list than almost all other functionality in 2014, but we executed on the other functionalities on our list, so it worked out. But at the beginning of build season, I believed that ideally a robot-robot catch at the highest levels would take the same amount of time as trussing to the human player and having them load the ball into the robot. We had a few catching cycles in Archimedes Qualifications 2014 that were our fastest cycles of the day, because we caught the ball, turned around, and made the shot.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

More than anything else, the 30 point climb was just incredibly difficult. First realize that a 30 point climb is +20 points over a normal robot since robots of any sort should be able to hang for 10. Second, an additional cycle is 12 points. It's far, far less effort to make a robot that you already need to make good at shooting discs a bit faster than it is to build one of the hardest mechanisms in FIRST history. Ultimately, the 30 point climb received its proper time in the spotlight as a difference maker in the IRI eliminations - but this is when every capable alliance was draining the human player station already!

Climbs ended up being a difference-maker at IRI, but had 1986 or 254 attended IRI, we could have seen an alliance with three climbs and a 7-disc auto, and a centerline auto. That's what I expected the highest levels to be. Almost every disc and climb possible scored.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The problem here isn't strategy, it's that you were just making stuff up really. Don't worry, we were all freshmen once. But seriously - we talk a lot about strategy before design, but that doesn't necessarily mean committing to a strategy before prototyping. Learning how foam balls would travel differently over longer distances required putting them in wheeled shooters and letting them fly, at which point it would be pretty obvious that range beyond the key would be at best difficult.

For the record, I was a sophomore at the time.
We did terrible prototyping in 2012 under extremely controlled conditions where we used the exact same ball to make the shots because for some reason we thought balls at competition would be more consistent. That came down to me not understanding how engineering worked at the time.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

So what are the common themes here? A lot of times it's hard to judge what teams are capable of building. This gets easier with experience, but oftentimes trying it yourself is the fastest way to find out if it's really possible. And don't be afraid to revise strategic decisions after learning it wasn't as easy as you guessed - way too many teams don't do this.

In your other cases, it seemed you didn't have a good grasp of match flow and how that effects what designs work best. How easy the task is to complete, how seamlessly it integrates itself into other strategies, how much coordination is required to pull off the task, how "worth it" the task is, all of these considerations are important. Think about what matches without that feature and what matches with that feature would look like. What would the alliance without the feature do to compensate? It's not always as simple as "score a little bit more in other ways".

Hope this wasn't a totally useless post.

Thank you, Chris, for responding in a constructive way about the subject matter I intended to discuss. It was interesting.