Quote:
Originally Posted by JesseK
When you do any of the strategies that have been mentioned above, you almost inherently take yourself out of any sort of scoring position. Sure, you could pin the ball against the wall and never move, or pin a backboard against the overpass so the opponent can never hurdle -- but the opponents have other ways to score, and you do not since you're sitting still.
At best, a bot built for a defensive strategy will be able to successfully use the strategies at spur-of-the-moment oppotunities. Still, a steady-scoring opponent will consistently outscore the defensive bot. The scores for the two alliances will be low, but I'm willing to bet that the "defensive" alliance's score will be the lower of the two almost every time.
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Strategically, trading machine for machine is a wash, and most teams will not shoot for this as a viable strategy. It marginalizes you into the masses (you are at maximum offsetting whatever machine you are defending against), making it hard for you to reach the top 8 positions, and this usually means that other teams will pick a scoring machine over yours.
Some situations arise though, where defensively one machine can effectively shut down, or slow the progress of multiple opponent machines or scoring strategies. When this is feasible some very tough decisions come into play, like subjective rule enforcement, and how to deal with subjective views on the GP of your strategy. Some games lend themselves to this, and others do not (I really wanted to see a bar defending robot in 2004, we tried but failed). Do I think this year you could win with a defending robot? Probably not. But many teams whose ball manipulation devices fail or fall short of being effective will default to some defensive strategies that while secondary functions, if the team is smart enough and talented enough to pull it off they may do very well in the competition - especially at weaker regionals where there might not even be a full list of 24 scoring machines. It is good to have a lot of this stuff available to your team if it becomes necessary.
In 2005 my old team could only get 1-2 tetras on the entire match, but we went 6-0 in Atlanta almost purely on defensive and offensive strategy and teamwork.