Full court shooting strategy

[NotaJoke]

Originally Posted by Ronnie314

No one knew we were also able to shoot from up close and do cycles.

This included the first seed, who might have chosen differently had you displayed the ability to react better to defense during qualifications. Sometimes it's good to keep an ace up your sleeve for eliminations, but you should also take every opportunity to show off if you'd rather be picked by the first alliance. Finding a balance between these two aspects is the true challenge.

[stuart2054]

Originally Posted by thefro526

It's a hard call to make on the fly, especially in between elimination matches if you want to do it legally.

A wide enough 84" tall robot in the right position is pretty much the end all be all to the FCS game. Even with a high exit point on the FCS (50" or so), the 84" wall would only need to be within 30-36" to render that FCS useless, assuming they're exit angle is somewhere less than 30 degrees from horizontal. (haven't seen something more steep yet)

That being said, there are some interesting trade-offs to this decision.

- Assuming it's something being done very quickly, odds are the 84" tall wall is going to be stuck at 84" tall. If it is, you've now limited your defender to playing on a third of the field... And of that third, you lose quite a bit of it to both the pyramid and your opponents loading zone.

- Assuming you're building blocker that can withstand repeated shots at point black range, it's going to have to be well constructed. Odds are, this is going to shift the CoG of the robot up quite a bit, which could make playing effective defense a bit difficult.

- If the opposing alliance has a capable floor loader, the FCS robot only needs to get discs to the other end of the field, not necessarily score them. In this case, shooting over the blocker becomes a viable option.

Now, if you can make the blocker removable and/or actuate into position, you can ignore a lot of this stuff. But, if you think about it, if your alliance is willing to sacrifice a machine to be an 84" tall wall then odds are, the opposing alliance is willing to sacrifice one of their machines to remove the wall from the equation.

Also, at CH, in multiple matches, the opposing alliance would send two or even all three of their robots after 225's FCS in an attempt to prevent it from getting to the feeder station. One of the things to remember when trying such a strategy, is that you can't win if you're not scoring points... Specifically in Semi 2-1, the Blue Alliance spent the first 45-50 seconds of the match playing defense against 225. During this time, we (341) essentially were playing offense on a completely open field which let us put up some solid points and win the match...

We have a nice deployable tall arm that is about 80 inches high when deployed. It is just a square tube within a tube with a cord that that pulls the inner tube up as the the whole assembly is rotated up by a pneumatic cylinder. It has a bungy inside to pull it back down when the cylinder is retracted again. It does not have much effect on our CG.

We only used it in the last of the Gull Lake district finals after our shooter feeder was damaged and it worked great. The problem is as several have mentioned that it takes you out of offense. We are primarily an offense robot and are loath to use this unless neccesary. I would like to see more defensive robots have someting like this and we have even talked about making something similar to retrofit onto elimination round alliance partners.

You can see this match here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1XVwRkKOlw

[faust1706]

What I was trying to say is, with the G18...I think the rule is, they gave us a technical foul for keeping them outside the autozone. The head judge interpreted that we were doing that to SOLELY get the foul points, when really we were trying to clear a path for our full court shooter. That's what costed us the second match in the finals

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by faust1706

What I was trying to say is, with the G18...I think the rule is, they gave us a technical foul for keeping them outside the autozone. The head judge interpreted that we were doing that to SOLELY get the foul points, when really we were trying to clear a path for our full court shooter. That's what costed us the second match in the finals

The rule is G18-1:

Originally Posted by G18-1

Strategies aimed solely at forcing the opposing ALLIANCE to violate a rule are not in the spirit of FRC and are not allowed. Rule violations forced in this manner will not result in assessment of a penalty on the target ALLIANCE .

Violation: TECHNICAL FOUL

It's an hard call to make, though in most situations, I would rule against the 84" tall robot, I think. Assuming the 84" tall robot is attempting to block shots, they're at some point between their opponent's feeder station and their autozone boundary. Odds are, there's only about 2'-3' of play in that spot, so if they get hit hard enough, they'll be out of the autozone. If they don't imediately attempt to return to their autozone or decrease their height, the penalty should be assessed to them.

Now, If they're attempting to return to the autozone and kept from it by an opponent, then technically the opponent is the reason that the blocker is in violation. Now, if the blocker can decrease their height (retract their mechanism) they should do so to be back at the correct height. If they cannot... I'd have to say that they should have build a machine that has a way to retract the blocker or not be moved from the autozone... Unless, of course, a team is obviously keeping a blocker/over height robot outside of the loading zone for no reason other than to attempt to have a technical foul assessed against them (i.e. the blocker has no robot to block)...

[faust1706]

It is a hard call to make. It really is a judgement call. Some teams are able to lower their....blocker for lack of a better word, and others cannot for they are just pool noodles or something of the sort quickly made. The question remains for the teams that CAN lower their blocker and get pushed out of the autozone completely: Why aren't they required to lower their blocker instead of trying to get back into the autozone? If they have the ability to lower it, then shouldn't it be fair play to keep them out of the autozone?

[Bryan1625]

At the Greater Kansas City Regional team 1806 (S.W.A.T.) was very effective as a full court shooter. Throughout the competition more and more teams tried to change their bot to be taller to block them yet only 2 or 3 teams were successful at it

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Originally Posted by John Sabath

Case in point: The St. Louis Regional and team 1706.

1706 plowed their way through qualifications (scoring 100+ points in almost every game they played in) and ended up on the 1st seeded alliance. However, they ended up losing in the finals due to 3284's defensive net completely shutting them down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHik1lx5PLw

Doggon, that drive train was ridiculous. Two offensive linemen and they STILL couldn't keep 3284 from blocking the shots. That's one beefy drive system.

[faust1706]

3284's drive train was one to take notes on. Very powerful. Throughout eliminations, they were able to completely shut down a robot from scoring and could easily push robots around as if they weren't there. Quite impressive.

[Zakreon]

Our bot wasn't really designed with defensive play in mind, it was mostly just figured to be a selling point, and our tank drive was just us attempting to keep the drive simple compared to the headache inducing swerve we did last year!

However, nets like ours don't necessarily invalidate the full court shooters. If we were on 1706's alliance (like we wanted to be) then we would be the ones pushing away any potential blockers, and you don't really have to push them very far to keep them at bay.

[B Dot]

Originally Posted by Zakreon

Our bot wasn't really designed with defensive play in mind, it was mostly just figured to be a selling point, and our tank drive was just us attempting to keep the drive simple compared to the headache inducing swerve we did last year!

However, nets like ours don't necessarily invalidate the full court shooters. If we were on 1706's alliance (like we wanted to be) then we would be the ones pushing away any potential blockers, and you don't really have to push them very far to keep them at bay.

Unless they are the full 84 inches =)

We would have loved to have gotten the opportunity to play with you guys in the finals as well

[Zakreon]

When our shooter is raised to about 30 degrees is when our net is at the full 84", and so when we lower down to be flat it only loses a few inches, and you can see that once we are pushed out of the autonomous zone then we can no longer block. So even at 84" you only need to push them a bit out of the autonomous zone to deny them their blocking.

We have a practice bot and we'll probably be looking at these distances a bit closer between now and the Arkansas regional.