I've been thinking about this thread again, and I decided to analyze IRI this time as a sampling of the best teams in the world ought to produce the best shooters as well, right?
IRI had:
- 26 Single Flywheel Shooters
- 21 Catapults
- 11 Double Flywheel Shooters
- 2 Linear Punches
- 9 Robots without a high goal shooter
- And 1619's shooter, which I'm not quite sure how to classify, but it used a lot of wheels. If someone from 1619 would comment, that would be cool.
Of those teams, in eliminations were 32 teams as follows:
- 14 Single Flywheel Shooters
- 7 Catapults
- 4 Double Flywheel Shooters
- 2 Linear Punches
- 3 Robots with no high goal shooting
- 1619
There are a few ways to analyze this data, so I've put it into a little table. The first one is the number of teams with that type of shooter compared to the total number of teams at IRI. The second is the number in eliminations with that type of shooter compared to the number of teams at IRI with that shooter, and the third is the number of teams in eliminations with that type of shooter relative to the total number of teams in eliminations.
This data could mean absolutely nothing, and the shooters at IRI could be happenstance and good teams just happened to draw their inspiration from 2012 robots or something. Or maybe not.
I think the most interesting numbers are the comparison between the first row and the third row. Despite being the largest group of robots at IRI, single flywheel machines were over-represented in eliminations, while the next three largest blocks(Catapult, Double Flywheel, None) were all underrepresented in eliminations. The middle row also represents that, with more than 50% of all single flywheel teams at IRI making eliminations.
Knowing this information (and also my experience in the past with some very finnicky double flywheel shooters and catapults), I would use a single flywheel shooter in a similarly styled shooting game in the future (although God knows I'm going to eat these words when I want to pursue some other shooter a few years from now and my students do some research and find this post).