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Unread 02-02-2017, 20:51
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iyportne iyportne is offline
A Life Spent Reversing Entropy
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FRC #1533 (Triple Strange)
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Join Date: Dec 2014
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Re: Defensive Robots/Strategies?

This kind of thread is among my favorite. So much good information, point and counter-point, and I most often defer to the teams with the most experience in planning and executing this aspect of the game.

This year however has two very striking differences, and only one mentioned here so far. The fact that this years field is mirrored, meaning that instead of counter current flow, most team's modeled and practiced cycle times will likely mostly occupy the same space, leading to offense basically having a built in defense - or the stronger bully wins. This also means that defensive skirmishes have to be well designed and executed or you are interfering with the cycle time of both you and your opposing alliance. Couple that with more than one skirmish and you could shut down the whole field, especially in elims with 4 total gear runners.

The second difference is the possibility for hundreds of game pieces littering the field. Not all robot-robot interaction is going to be the classical, and by now predictable, bumper-to-bumper, my drive train is better than your drive train pushing around...there's going to be balls (and maybe gears) stuck between bots in what may be a completely untested fashion. Remember the old trick, now outlawed, of putting solid noodles on bottom and hollow on top in order to jack up an opponents bot to get the upper hand. I predict many robots will be getting jacked up on fuel, and I'm not talking about Red Bull.

This years game is sure to be a crowd pleaser, and I further predict as the competition weeks progress, when offensive strategies progress so too will defensive strategies and we may not see the steep curve in high scores that we did last, especially considering the diminishing returns of gear running.
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