[ZZII 527]

First off, congratulations to the BAE finalists, champions, and award winners. This was my first time at the Manchester Regional and I really enjoyed it. We had a very successful run and wound up ranked 16/51, I think, but unfortunately didn't get into the playoffs. Anyways, here's some things I saw at this regional that might be helpful to teams at upcoming regionals:

-Penalties play a huge role in scoring. Early in the regional, teams were getting penalized for not visibly touching the loading triangles, but after a mad rush for "brightly colored zip ties," these penalty flags stopped flying as much. Human players also got better at keeping both feet in the triangles. One killer penalty that became important as more teams played aggresive defense was interfering with a robot at a loading zone...a 30 point penalty that can easily swing a match one way or another.

-Defense is huge. Alliances learned to dedicate one robot entirely to defense as the competition progressed. Defense is more aggressive this year too than I've seen. Many teams push the limit between "shoving" and "ramming" and of course several robots got flipped. Many of the playoff rounds had lower total scores than the qualifying rounds. Several low, fast, high-traction robots with only mediocre or semi-functional arms made it to the playoffs on the strength of their deadly defense (501 is the best example I can think of.)

-Stacking height was not as important as strategic positioning. Making rows seemed to be the priority, and as a result Tetras wound up spread pretty evenly over the goals. Most goals had only one or two Tetras and there was rarely more than 4 or 5 on any given goal.

-More alliances than I thought took advantage of 10-point parking. There is actually plenty of room for 3 robots in the end zone if they are in the right spots.

-If you can cap a vision tetra in autonomous, you will have the respect of everyone and are basically guaranteed a spot in the playoffs because not one team did it in all three days at BAE as far as I know. The most common autonomous was whacking the side tetras down, which despite being only one point at first often saved some effort in completing a row or two. Some teams capped non-vision tetras in autonomous as well.

Hope some of this is helpful. I can't wait to see some more regional action! Good luck everyone.