[Zuelu562]

Jumping off StAxis, I would change Stronghold in the following ways:

1: Crossing the auto line on your side of the field (ie, if you are blue, crossing the auto line on the blue outer works side) becomes the point where a foul is assessed, and any significant (read not extension vs extension contact) beyond the midline is a foul.

Encourages multi-ball/using the center balls in auto, the consequences and end results of current center line penalties (usually a robot heading in the wrong direction nearly contacting an opposing robot [almost] in the outer works) are still covered.

2: Some change to the ranking point system such that wins recieve a static or static + 1 ranking points and losses receive bonuses for doing well, such as outlined earlier (my thoughts - Win: 2 points plus 1 point for Breach AND Capture. Tie score: 1 point for each alliance plus 1 for Breach AND Capture per alliance, Loss: 0 points, plus 1 for Breach, 1 for Capture. Something like that.)

This eliminates teams "Running away" with the standings that have a > 90% capture rate, and doesn't completely disincentivize winning. Week 1 you're going to see a lot of 2 to 0 or 1 RP matches, later at DCMP's you'll see 3 to 2's left, right and center.

3: Get rid of the Audience Selection. Hindsight being 20/20, seeing how many events (my experience at a Week 2, 5 and queueing at NE DCMP) quickly devolved into the same 4 audience selections coming out every time until eliminations (where we saw drastically more Drawbridge, especially come the finals), it barely made sense to have it actually be a choice.

My personal solution would be either FMS random selection from the category per match (which becomes locked in for the match the same time as the alliance selected defenses), or have the teams pick what it is from the predetermined category, but it must be in slot 3. The former option is a lot cleaner from an event perspective, but the restriction on the team's end still gives them choice from the latter.

More might come to mind, but as you can see, a lot of my thoughts on how to improve this game are complete hindsight things that even the most experienced mentors may not have been able to predict would happen given the sheer Monkey-Shakespeare quotient that FRC inherently has. I think this game has the least amount of game grinding failures certainly in my time in FIRST, and one of the fewest all time. It's certainly a game FIRST can look back on and go "How do we recreate the success of Stronghold with this game".