[Greg Peshek]

The strategy I found most useful at Florida and suggested to most of our alliance partners was to essentially have a complete offense bot, a hybrid offense/defense bot, and a defense/empty cell runner bot.

We used this fairly successfully in the qualifying rounds. We were the team that 1144 picked accidentally.. if you will. Our first match strategy was to keep the 8th seeds #1 offense bot busy, while 1144 played offense and 1885 played defense. Now the problem with that was when we played their offensive bot, we ended up getting scored on a bit, and we lost the first match by two points.

The next match we went back to my favorite strategy with us playing the hybrid offense/defense bot. Kind of acting as a pick for 1144 while playing some good offense. We found when you didn't directly engage a robot and play "zone defense", you have a much better chance of not getting scored on. We won that match by a decent margin.

Not to take anything away from the 8th seeded alliance, but I'm fairly confident that we would have won the third match if our robot hadn't been stuck in the starting position from w/e technical difficulties we were having with the field.

So, personally I like the mix of the three different types of robots. If you have a good enough offensive robot, I believe you are better off putting another offensive robot that has a decent drivetrain in the hybrid spot. This strategy might not be for everyone (since normally our team played the hybrid spot), but if you have a robot that can do that, I think it's worth a try. It's certainly a strategy I'm looking to tryout in ATL especially with the amount of completely offensive robots that will be there.

-Greg P.