[TubaMorg]

Hey Chris27: What an extraordinary post! I am impressed with the thought that went into it and how well it is written. I am sure if most people were honest, they would admit to the same sort of feelings at the end of their competitions. I appreciate these feelings because it is reflective of a strong desire to succeed, which should always be encouraged. After all, how can anyone pour their blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention their soul) into a project and expect to come up short?

I hope you realize that your experience this year's regional is as much of a learning experience as last year's national comp. Believe it or not, the nature of the competetion is such that it is very easy for things to go wrong, especially if you put all your eggs in one basket. Successful teams, this year, are ones that have planned several different strategic scenarios: How to counter defensive bots, How to score if our camera breaks, How to defend good high scorers, What is the best way to win autonomous, etc. From the webcasts I've watched it has been a beautiful evolution of strategy as the competitions progress, especially during the finals. One alliance would figure out a way to neutralize a scoring threat on the other team one round, then the next round that scoring threat would readapt and score again. It has been truly amazing how quickly alliances were changing their game plans.

So the point is, while the bitterness of defeat is understandable, and laying the blame of your defeat at the feat of "them" is human nature, you don't want to spend too much time indulging in this. It is a good idea, however, to take a good look at where things went wrong that you CAN fix. What could your team have done differently? Clearly you wanted to shoot the high goal, a hard task to accomplish even if robots aren't ramming you. Perhaps you spent too much time perfecting the ultimate shooter, but forgot about the fact that the other alliance might have robots designed to defeat the ultimate shooter.

This year's game is much different than last year. Last year's game rules were pretty complicated, but the strategy was simple: stack fast and capture rows. This year the game is very simple, but the strategy has never ending levels of complexity. There is no BEST design for a robot. The alliances that are winning have good robots of many designs types (low shooters, high shooters, rambots), but the reason they are winning is because of their game play. One of the best autonomous modes I have seen so far (I'm sorry I forget the team numbers) involved cooperation with two teams in an alliance. One of the teams had an excellent shooter. The opposite alliance had a defensive auto mode designed to ram them to prevent the shooter from scoring. Solution? Another robot from the shooter's team then set their autonomous to pick the blocker so their shooter could shoot. The adaptation was fantastic! Remember this for next year, go through the rules with a critical point of view, dreaming of all the different ways the game can be played and think of options/solutions to all of these.