How do you decide your strategy?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Talking for a moment on what Don said.

One of the methods I have been working on employing more and more is making a simple simulation of the game using excel. I then sit and play with strategies. Figure out how to score the most points as quickly as possible. Assume this is what the top tier teams are going to do. You now have three choices. Beat them at their own game, find how best to compliment this strategy, or find how to stop this strategy. Obviously, you will always have your oddballs (71 '02, 469 '10) but those are exceptions. Though, you should try to come up with these game breaker strategies if you can.

The reason I'm working on this is because I, stupidly, missed the importance of the minibot this year. I let me ego get in the way of good strategy when I said, "I don't like the concept of a minibot, scoring tubes is where the points are anyway" I had a bad case of the dumb and didn't use numbers to make my decisions. My lesson from last year was: Use numbers to determine the bare minimum needed to build a competitive robot and then rank every additional task according to value. Focus on the bare minimum first because it is better to have a functioning robot that does 1 task than a half done robot that does 4.

I will second the suggestion of reading Jim Zondag's paper. I also recommend JVN's white paper on Weighted Objective Tables, and Karthik's presentation on FRC Strategies. Also, as much as I hate to stroke his ego Chris Picone is surprisingly good at figuring out strategies, shoot him a PM and see if he will walk you through his strategy.