DISC diplomacy

[jvriezen]

This is one thing I haven't seem much discussion about. There will be lots of different situations, but here is a good example:

Your alliance in a qual round has the following bots:

Bot 1) A proven highly accurate full court shooter
Bot 2) Has a floor pickup and good short range shooter while touching pyramid
Bot 3) Has no floor pickup, a long range shooter, moderately accurate, but needs some tuning and/or driver practice. Bot 3 wants real field experience to continue to tune and show off its skills to aid in getting picked.

How do you allocate the white discs to human players and to robots (I'm assuming here that human players aren't necessarily going to only feed their own robots)

The best strategy is to give all the discs to Bot 1, and have Bot 2 pick up those that miss. Bot 3 ends up playing D and gets zero discs (other than pre-load) to show off/improve. Basically its a sort of 'starvation' situation, but within a single alliance.

And then, what happens when Bot 1 is heavily defended? How do you dynamically decide among human players (and coaches?) how many discs should go to Bot 2 or 3 instead, maybe on the opposite feeder station?

I suspect discs be split more evenly in practice rounds and this may be the only opportunity for some weaker teams to get a lot of discs on the real field, if they play 'smart' for the win during qualifications. The ones who suffer are those that are inoperable for a few matches and then get things fixed -- you have to convince your alliance mates that you are worth the risk to load discs.

Update: One way is to give each team 1/3 of the discs and if they are agreeable, they can give up their discs (either to another human before/during the match or by feeding a bot other than their own.