Is Defense Finally Viable

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Dr.Bot

IMHO, while your limiting your opponents scoring by running defense, you are also limiting your alliance's scoring by not assisting. So there is no net gain to defense unless there are special circumstances such as a terrific autonomous mode where one alliance has a huge lead in points. and then just runs defense with two robots essentially shutting down the their opponents. This seems pretty petty and mean spirited, and not the gracious thing to do.

I'm not one to advocate applying GP notation to [legal] match strategies, but the first sentence of this itself seems to miss a logical way to play zones this year. With a 3- (or 2-) pass zone layout for assisting, you will inherently have time in which you are not playing offense. One of the most logical options during that interim is to play defense. It doesn't--nor has it ever been--necessary to have defense as your sole occupation in order for it to be "viable".

Originally Posted by Dr.Bot

If history repeats itself, I am guessing that defense will not be very important in qualifiers, but may be extremely important in finals. Because there are four alliance partners; one may well be a defense specialist that matches up well against an effective high scorer. Designing such a robot is risky..[read this too]

Just a note, there are only 4 alliance partners at Worlds Elims, and even then you're only playing 3 at a time. Also, a note to rookies, the importance of defense in quals is highly (no, highly) dependent on your event/geographic region.