Advice for new strategist?

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by pabeekm

Sorry if I'm nitpicking, but I respectfully disagree with this note; in my three years in FRC I've seen only teams with a lot of resources/experience pull this off well. I've far more often seen teams fail because they took on too much when building their robot, have mechanisms that turn out to be hardly used in competition, or waste lots of time on field performing the roles that they won't be most valuable for in eliminations. I'd advise spending the first few days of build season doing heavy analysis of the rules to find what strategy you will get the most out of before even thinking about the design of the robot, then, build primarily for that strategy; being able to do one thing very well will likely get you more than being able to do multiple things adequately.

I respectfully disagree with your respectful disagreement. There's a distinction between building to play multiple roles and designing a "multitool" robot. This year, for example, a relatively simple robot with a roller intake and a surgical tubing catapult was able to play a large portion of roles in the game.

There is a huge difference between a mechanically complex robot and a strategically-- most teams can't pull off a mechanically complex robot well, but the more you can do with a simple mechanism the better off you are. True flexibility is something I think is often undervalued, and even less achieved.