pic: Points Required to Win a Week 1 Qualifying Match

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Taylor

That is by no means a 2011 anomaly; it's the case in every FRC game.

Play clean, score a logo on the bottom row, you've (statistically) got a winning percentage!

Not sure I agree with that in practice for an overall season of competitions. I think it's still too early to garner any holistic statistical analysis. It will be interesting to watch 2 things:
1.) How each weeks' individual data changes
2.) How the combined data averages out over the overall season

Bottom row: still not a *great* strategy overall but it IS the only tube strategy that can be built from only KOP, free stuff via FIRST, and a few minor other things (speed controllers or valves, take your pick). Karthik talked about a team from Chicago that really stretches a minimum budget every year with GREAT success, and I suspect that's what they chose this year if they still have the same constraints.

Which leads me to my next point about teams knowing their limits during week 1 (JVN/Karthik/others preach this too). Any team can take these graphs for all weeks and then the overall season and apply it to the decisions made during week 1. What assumptions were made that were irrelevant, dead on, or plainly incorrect? What strategy concessions could have been made in order to make a simpler robot yet still win 75, 80, or 90% of matches, given the week of play for competition?

For example, we have to skimp on our minibot deployment because our lift is so heavy. It's so heavy because it has to reach the top row (2 stages). It wasn't really in our capability this year to make the lift lighter, though there are other options for us to pursue if weight is an issue. Yet on build day 2, we decided that since we were competing in a Week 4 regional, and it would be the 2nd regional for many teams, our NEED was to put 1+ logos on the top row; minibot could be secondary. I think we'll see minibots still be factors in match wins, yet overall scores will become higher because of tubes more than minibots. Thus, the weight and effort are worth the 2nd stage for the lift. If we would have attended a week 1 regional, I possibly could have driven the discussion more towards middle row + better minibot.