[team4243]

For us, visibility was a bigger issue than anticipated (drive team speaking here). If the opposing alliance selects both a portcullis and a drawbridge, teams without good cameras will have a difficult time. We saw one team do the pole camera for the standard, but we have no idea if that was helpful at all.

Breaching was crucially important, and two teams on an alliance should be able to do it every single time.

The FMS was buggy, (to be expected for a 0.5 competition) and we were totally incapacitated for one match through no fault of our own. Several teams, including 343 and others, had issues with communications dropping out during the match as well.

Unless your bot has an excellent shooter, it's not wise to spend much time lining up for a shot. As other commentators have noted, the low goal shooting is much more difficult than it appears, especially without a reliable camera. We had little success with shooting, and focused mostly on breaching defenses.

Although teams should already know this, the actual portcullis game piece is much easier to open than any wood imitations built for practice. It's on a coil spring, and one team had good success just by jamming a wedge underneath the door and driving through.

If teams within the alliance can cooperate, opening the doors is relatively easy, having one team open the door from the opponent's courtyard and getting the other alliance members to drive through from the neutral zone. We did this twice and it worked well!

Climbing will become more and more important as time goes on, and it was a huge factor in alliance selection.

Field reset times are much longer than usual, and the competition won't follow the schedule at all. Palmetto was about an hour behind during the entire competition.

Even if your team doesn't make it into Elimination, we recommend staying to watch. At higher levels of play, Stronghold is immensely fun to watch.

Stronghold is an excellent game, and teams everywhere should have a blast playing it. We wish everyone the best of luck!

Team 4243