[evanperryg]

Some of my observations from Palmetto, along with some speculation on the future of this game:

I think I discussed my thoughts on breach specialists in a post a while ago. As 1296 proved very clearly, the breaching specialist can get itself through quals very easily, at least at low levels of play (I would expect this trend to continue at stronger events). They allow alliance partners to focus on other objectives, while reliably picking up an extra RP for the alliance. However, come time for elims, the breacher becomes extremely reliant on alliance partners to pick up the tower points they aren't picking up. If the breacher's alliance can't match the scoring power of the breacher, then the alliance is dead in the water.

The geometry of low bar robots makes the C defenses very hard, but a taller robot has the potential to do them much more easily. With the rarity of robots that can effectively solo the C defenses, I'd expect them to be a unique commodity at higher levels of play, where the huge amount of time they'll save their partners could be the difference between a winning and losing alliance.

I was very surprised by the amount of scaling I saw, even if few of the scalers were consistent. Scaling comes with only 10 more points than challenging, and requires some clever engineering, but clearly it's very possible, and not too difficult for taller robots. One scaler really isn't much, but an alliance with two or three consistent scalers has the ability to swing the score in their favor right at the end of a match, with no counterplay available to the opposing alliance.

This might have been my impression of the game influencing what I actually saw, but whenever the portcullis and/or drawbridge were on the field, some robots seemed more confused than normal. I'm curious to see how many lowbar teams put bendy flags or lights sticking up out of their robot just so they can see themselves.

I was very, very impressed by teams 179 and 2393. I don't know exactly how 2393 works, but I'm guessing that, based on the green light ring, they are using vision tracking. With good code, and a good shooter, it is completely viable to shoot from mid-courtyard or the outer works. However, I'm still not completely sold on vision tracking for shooting. An inconsistent mechanism, or bad code, could make a vision tracking shooter useless in the blink of an eye. Shooting from midfield and the outer works presents the problem that you're not just fighting against defenders, you're fighting against yourself to have a shooter that lines up to the tiny goal perfectly and shoots at the right velocity, every single time. However, 179 and 2393 showed that it is possible to overcome these difficulties on a competition field, which is very impressive.