My Impressions After A Day At GSR:
1. The bottom row is almost all that matters, game after game after game. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it; it's the easiest way to significantly alter the score of the game. It takes almost no time at all to lift a tube 2.5 feet, and there's no risk of collapse.
2. Lifting is about the only way to make the bottom row not matter... much. As far as I could tell, a successful 12" lift won every match that it occurred in... except for once (and my team was on the alliance that beat the lift
). Unless an opposing alliance scores more than a 5 in row, 30 points is generally enough.
3. Lifting is hard and rarely successful. It wins games, but it's hard. Only robots that have well thought out lifts have been successful, and lifting 2 robots (enough to outright win nearly every game played today) has happened maybe 1-2 times in nearly 50 matches. Additionally, if an alliance doesn't devote significant time to getting over to the lifting bot, they're liable to be blocked from ever getting to the home zone.
4. Spoilers don't get used. They. Just. Don't. It's sad from a strategist's prespective, but teams tried to place them maybe 1 out of every 10 matches... and were promptly blocked from ever putting them on. I'm actually not surprised at all as I predicted this; placing spoilers is a very reactive strategy as opposed to proactive ringer placing. Its often worth more to double the score of your longest row than to split your opponent's row into two. Furthermore, placing ringers doesn't set off the red alerts in defenders like picking up a spoiler does.
5. Since spoilers are never successfully placed, spoiler removal capability is kind of meaningless. It's possible that it might matter once in the eliminations somewhere, but I wouldn't count on any more than just seeing a few spoilers placed.
6. Autonomous is a bust, which is kind of sad but completely unsurprising. One keeper was scored today. Just one. As a software guy, I know that it's not an easy autonomous to write this year. Last year, you could use the light to align a shooter and fire from the starting position. This year, you have to move while tracking the light, and move a manipulator to the proper height. This is not easy, and there really isn't much incentive to make it work. Since spoilers aren't used, keepers are basically ringers (and even if spoilers were used, it wouldn't matter very often as spoilers would break the row on the ringer next to the keeper). That's 2 whole points for your trouble, which is why teams just aren't bothering. (My team for one instead focused on an advanced teleoperated control system with preset postitions recorded into EEPROM, and relegated autonomous to that bottom part of the software todo list that never sees a share of the limited integration time.)
7. This is the year of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method of arm design. You want a simple, efficient arm that grabs a ringer from the floor and places it on the low row as fast as possible. Really that's all you usually need to focus on to do well against the field.
8. Everything else beyond scoring on the bottom row is a bonus, especially lifting. If robots can easily get on to your lift bot for a 30-point bonus, you'll get into the elimination rounds without any difficulty at all.
9. Ultimately I guess I have to agree with that earlier poster that called this a game of volume rather than strategy. It favors the efficient, and the simple strategy is the best.
I guess in general, I'm disappointed by what I saw today. When I first saw the game in January, my first impression was that the rack would rarely reach 2/3 capacity, spoilers and automous were red herrings, and that lifting was the magic key. To my dismay today, I was right on two of these and too optimistic on 2/3 capacity thing (it's more like 1/3 to 1/2).
I expect that we'll see the game evolve quite a bit over the next few weeks, as teams are barely scraping the surface this week.