Thread: How Hard is FIRST Stronghold?
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Unread 13-02-2016, 01:30
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Re: How Hard is FIRST Stronghold?
The beauty of this game is not in the difficulty of each individual obstacle. The beauty of this game is the GDC creating a game where each team will needs to make difficult decisions about how they engineer their robot.

By teams accepting the lowbar as the primary defense to attack, they will limit how capable the robot can climb, scoop, and score. It will also limit how the robot can attack the other defenses. Since the lowbar is the low-hanging fruit - most teams will attempt this one first.

This low-hanging fruit of the lowbar means that somewhere between 75-90% of teams have designed a GreenHorns style robot - and thus overlooked essential portions of the game. If 75-90% of the teams at a regional can successfully attack the lowbar (or at least try) - how many of these teams will gum up the lowbar area?

The 10-25% of teams that attacked the rest of the defensive walls disregarding the lowbar altogether - they will be much more capable to create a robot that can traverse the Sally Port, CdF, Portcullis, etc. It also sets up their team to create a shooter that is more difficult to defend. These are the robots that will be the most attractive come alliance selection. Does your team choose from a wide variety of GreenHorns, or does your team take a highly-effective breacher that can scoop and score? Or maybe there are enough GreenHorns style robots that can truly do both...

Then you are left choosing from robots that are best adapted for the end game.

I also think with the RoboRio's tendencies towards brownouts, teams with 2-3 CIM motor boxes will have to limit their other capabilities. Tank drives, tread drives, etc that wish to push and bully for defense will find that they have difficulties. Last season, most teams could run around with light drive trains and not worry about a defender. So this may place in the minds of some of the younger teams that you can build a stalwart drive train and at the same time operate a high-functioning manipulator.

My goodness, the GDC did a great job. But back to GingerPower's op:

It is a simple game with difficult decisions.
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Last edited by Chief Hedgehog : 13-02-2016 at 01:33.
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