Quote:
Originally Posted by iCurtis
I didn't watch the whole thing either, as we still had a robot to build, but I watched probably half a dozen.
1. Robots that are not moving are death. You MUST keep moving. When someone stopped near a HP they'd get filled up with balls. When someone stopped, a robot of the opposite alliance would go and dump their load. I saw a robot not move in autonomous once. That was bad, real bad. You do not want to start 26 points in the hole.
2. Super Cells are important. While a scrimmage is not a regional, the huge point swings that Super Cells provide, are well, huge. I'd bet a snickers bar that at least 75% of qualifying matches during week 1 could've been one with 2 scored super cells (2 Super Cells per alliance seemed pretty typical).
3. HPs have a tendency to miss Super Cells. Perhaps it was the added pressure, but they'd make orbit balls in from across the field and miss Super Cells that were going into a robot right in front of them.
4. Humans score A LOT of the points. It seemed that at least 20 points per alliance were scored in autonomous. It seemed to me that most alliances scored between 30 and 50 points, so Humans are making big contributions. Obviously, this is a scrimmage so robots may not be in tip top shape, but it's something to look out for.
5. There is a tendency to overshoot. I saw a bunch of robots go for an easy score and miss because their power dumper/shooter gave the balls too much "oomph."
6. It's really hard to dump in the middle of the field. It seemed that if a robot was along the edge of the field, it was pretty easy to pin them long enough to score a hopper full. It was not so easy to pin a robot in the middle of the field.
|
I admit, I was dead wrong about the Super cells (and owe my teammate a buck already because of it) though I think teams that can score at will (there weren't many robots lighting it up yesterday except 126 will make it so that the Supercell won't hurt them.
Teams will have to definitely scout Payload Specialist and their shooting percentages and a third team could be picked just for a good payload specialist and an adequate robot (it moves).
The competition season begins just when high school basketball season ends and it would not surprise me to see FIRST teams lure basketball players to their teams. As hot shooter could be devastating. Especially slow or immobile robots and there are good FIRST teams out there with good high school basketball teams in their schools.