[KenWittlief]

from an engineering perspective there is no generic strategy that will take you from one year to the next.

Each year the game is different. The way you score points is different, the way you play defense, the importance of auton mode, alliance pairing...

The only thing that is consistant in engineering is change.

On the teams I have mentored the first thing we did after the kickoff was to analyse all the scoring possibilities. What is the max possible score? What is the best reasonable score if you focus on one method or another.

Once you have that figured out you can reasonably assume that some team will be able to make a robot that can approach the high (reasonable) score. You then have to assess your teams resources and abilities, to see where your team fits best into the picture.

Its a difficult decision process, maybe the most difficult part of FIRST, deciding what functions you want your robot to perform. If you try to do everything, then your robot will not do any one thing very well.

If you try to do only one thing, and do it better than everyone else, it might not be enough to win matches. Then unless you are allied with complementary robots you wont rank very high.

The bottom line for us was always this: we chose two or three main functions we wanted our robot to perform, then we judged our success on how well the robot did those things. You cant design a robot to win - you cant design a [WIN] button into the control panel. There is a lot of luck and chance involved, so all you can really do is match your robot design to the capabilites of your team (this year).

Next year things might be completely different for your team.

I should add, I was on moderately sized teams, 20 to 30 students with 4 or 6 excellent core engineer mentors. Two or three main functions worked well for our team size, to keep everyone busy and challenged with their subsystem, without causing the team to be overwhelmed.

Larger teams can do more, smaller teams might only choose one or two main functions.