Quote:
Originally Posted by sonichammer7476
This is very true. Our team is going on our 5th year, and have made it to Worlds for the past 2 years. Last year, we ended up being ranked 18th (or somewhere close to that) in Curie, and were not selected to advance into the final rounds. To me, we earned that ranking of 18th not through luck, but through a fair amount of skill (this greatly contrasts our first Worlds appearnace, where we were not blessed with a kind schedule). Many of the Top 10 selected teams with robots that they deemed 'expendable', in the sense that they had full intentions of butchering the robot to add elements useful to them, e.g. claws for cans. Sometimes it is not a concern of skill; rather, it is the fact that you are a 'tweener', like us (not Elite yet, but well on our way there).
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I point out that this year was very unusual in what mix of robots worked best on the field. The game was not well designed to use all 3 robots simultaneously in a high performing game. In fact, you could even see it in our alliance. Because we had 1671, we simply ramped back on how many stacks that our other two bots had to put up, down to 2 instead of the 3+ we had been making in the qualifying rounds. There weren't enough cans to make it worthwhile to go for more.
In previous years, the third bot could fit any number of roles. In our 2013 and 2014 alliances, our second choice could have been a first choice on lower alliances (and we were surprised that they were available at 24th pick.)
I'll point out another aspect that is key to the value of the third bot. We call it "value added"--its scoring non-teleop goals (which usually done by the first 2 bots) plus defensive ability. That's scoring in auto and the end game, plus stage points such as the assists in 2014. We always rank our 2nd picks by dropping teleop goal scoring.
The message is work to be in the top dozen and focus on performing supporting tasks that gain value to an alliance. Don't focus on trying to build for the "star attraction" of scoring the final points like goal scoring. Instead think of all of the ways to score points and think of which ways are least likely to interfere with the top alliance captains during teleop (or even auto).