I heard Adam on First cast knocking our concept of a big ramp and low scorer (expecting more from us - BTW I take no offense), Which I can understand. He expected us to bring back our 05 bot with the arm like 1345 has and the Exploding Minotaurs. Don't think that this wasn't our first initial design pattern. In fact plans were moving swiftly for the Exploding Minotaur design. But we took our 05 chassis and hung a ringer on it and then tried to score while playing average defense against it, and it became clear that defense is easy to play in this game. 1 bot on defense thats just halfway decent can shut down half the rack, of coarse the opponents side. Now all the great high scoring arm designs are held to maybe 2 scores until the end of the match. Yes they can keep capping while others are climbing but 60 points cannot be over come by 5 ringers "in a row". These rows are going to be hard to come by if both teams are "atempting to score". I think scoring is going to be more about having to score where you are forced to and not realy where you want to. We are planning to play a lot of defense.
For example, you're allowed to pin somone against the rack for as long as you want if they are trying to score. Thats a big rule! Those arms can get tangled up in those chains ya know... if someone shoves you from behind while your trying to center a ringer above a stinger your arm is going into the chains, will it catch? If you dont let go of that ringer you can be held there till the end of the match. If you let go you just wasted a lot of time picking up a ringer and going to score it. I'll bet that if you wind up with a great capper on your alliance, they will require somone on the alliance to play defense in order to "reserve" the spider legs they need to get better rows. That defender is critical in usefull scoring that can over come the ramp points. BTW from our estimates the best possible scoring from a single team/bot will not be more than 6 hung during a live match (this will be rare and undefended).
Granted that defense won't happen all the time and these great scorers will score. But when they do get shut down "all these ramps" are going to start looking pretty good. As long as they are truley big and wide and stable enough for frantic teens to navigate. Or the lifts, which kind of scare me, but are a good idea.
What do you think?
