Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell
Human Playing this year was much more difficult and required communication than the past two years. There wasn't much to communicate in 2013/14, but this year it made sense because of how stacking works.
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For the most part, I agree. But depening on your robot and team played the game in 2013/2014, human playering may have required similar amounts of communication.
2013- robots that needed precise alignment with the feeder and exclusive floor pickups that were cycling required similar communication (when 20 would cycle, we'd often pick up 1-3 stray discs off the floor, then communicate to our human player to drop 1-3 more on the floor. We didn't want to drop extra discs because opponent floor pickups could pick them up.
2014- teams with flexible strategies required really good communication with their far side human players, really smart human players, or both. (10 seconds left in the match, do I throw the ball into my team's robot or the designated finisher's robot, do I inbound the ball now when my team is being t-boned or wait until they get a better angle)
The difference, I think, is that almost every team in 2015 needed to have good drive-HP communication, while in 2013 and 2014 it was only really required for a smaller subset of teams, usually teams at higher levels of play.
As for driving between the seasons- they were very different.
2015 required extreme care. Calm, cool, and collected drivers who knew exactly what the robot was capable of were necessary.
2014 required much more aggressive drivers, depending on the robot. The drivers needed to be able to understand the robot's capability and evaluate risks when driving.
2013 depended on what robot you had, again. Most drivers just needed to be agile enough to juke defenders out, then careful lining up their shots. Full court shooters generally needed to be careful and get into position, because they were often top-heavy and only needed to get there once, while floor collectors needed to move a bit slower and more carefully to carefully grab the floor discs.
I think the takeaway is that drivers need to be practiced and really know their robot inside and out regardless of year, but many requirements for drivers otherwise change year-on-year.