[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by boiler

New and interesting strategy: build up a ton of points at autonomous mode, get the early lead, stock up on balls and play pre-shot-clock-era basketball where you just hold them until the absolute end of the match.

We war-gamed this strategy, and it works well, especially if you have a mixed team with a good shooter and a good defense bot. We hypothesized a robot with an amazing ball sucker, a big hopper, and a powerful 2-speed drive train following the suck-and-dump-once-at-the-end strategy. It worked really well, especially if the sucker could transfer balls to the shooter (a ball ejector on the top that could drop balls into a top-mounted hopper on the shooter). Regardless of the quality of the strategy, our students thought that this 'bot would be boring to build and went with a shooting strategy instead. I know of at least one old 3-digit team that is building a bot like this, and is even giving up ramp-climbing to focus on ball-hoarding.