Chesapeake District - Northern Virginia Event:
Especially so coming off a build season that in a region not prepared for the type of winter weather that hit, which cut into many team's testing and iteration time. That could play into the advantage of teams like 1418, who finished early and had plenty of time to troubleshoot and refine their low goal and scaling specialist machine. Similarly, it could work against 116 and 612, who have often struggled early in the season as they get the kinks worked out of their machines. While fine tuning a machine at early events is a viable strategy in the regional format, losing those points in districts can spell doom for a team's DCMP or CMP hopes.
Spot on LF! Programmer from 612 here, we spent a fairly large amount of time working on fixes for our robot in the time between matches, especially on the first day. However, this year we've done a lot better than we have in the past few years, and by the morning of the second day we were able to shoot high goal and cross every defense, though we only shot high goal once in my recollection *during* a match and we could not handle a few defenses (the sally port for example) without help.
Even though we are usually around the middle of the pack, this year we came out very strong. We oscillated between first and sixth place throughout the day, ending at 6th after our last match and moving up to the 5th place alliance captain. This coming competition (week 4) we plan to be even stronger with a ton of code work and some mechanical fixes.
Thanks for the shout out!