Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon Holley
Defense will be attempted by many teams who have not perfected their manipulators. This will fail miserably as these teams will experience a surplus of penalties.
At the scrimmage in suffield, almost every team who attempted some sort of a defensive strategy experienced a penalty while doing so. It is very hard to do much on the defensive side of the game. The scrimmage saw countless impeding and wrong way penalties. Many of those caused from defensive attempts. Someone have a different opinion?
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I agree for Week 1 events, but as the game evolves, defensive strategies that don't involve penalties when executed properly will emerge. In previous years, "conventional scoring" had obvious defensive methods, and the defensive teams dominated early regionals as the offensive team gained experience and methods to counter the defense. Unconventional methods were borderline impossible to stop during early regionals, but forms of defending them evolved over time as well.
Take for example the 2007 game. It was very difficult for offensive bots to place tubes early on, but as more scoring bots became effective and teams learned how to avoid defense, scoring increased. Ramps were next to impossible to stop early on, but by Championship several different methods had evolved (see 330 in SD and 177 on Einstein for two quick examples).
This year is just the same, but both hurdling and laps fall into the "unconventional" category given the rules in place this year. Methods exist to still play defense, but they involve much more sophistication, dedication, and patience than simply sitting in between the offensive robot and the goal or trying to push the offensive robot. It will be very difficult for the average "box-on-wheels" to play effective defense this year. Most defensive bots will have to incorporate aspects similar to scoring bots, if not be scoring bots themselves (who need a different role on their current alliance for whatever reason).