What if...

[brandon.cottrell]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

However, at our regional, and the others I saw on video, most alliances wound up consisting of one robot playing offense and two on defense. Alliances with two good offensive robots would put two on offense and one on defense to get the truss and assist points. I don't recall anyone at our regional successfully using a 3-assist strategy.

Really? Where'd you guys go?

At San Diego (which then was a Week 2 regional) the minimum was more like 2 robots assisting, and 1 playing defense. I will note however in matches like this one, sometimes, but for the most part it was generally 2 assists, even if it was a slow match with only a couple cycles on either side. However, this may have just been because we were matched with/against some pretty good teams who could assist in some way or another.

But in AA you were usually supposed to play defense if you didn't have to currently do anything related to the ball.

In the Elims, it was always 3. 1 inbounds into another, that one trusses, one after that scores usually, which was why robots like 3250, 4574, 4583 and 4486 were such good strategic picks.


All in all, I think we can all agree that the simplicity of Aerial Assist was its strong point and it's downfall. On one hand, the game was fairly easy to follow, and even if you didn't understand what assisting was you could still get a basic grasp of which side was winning based on general activity, like in Ultimate Ascent, or Rebound Rumble. On the other hand, to engineers it wasn't very challenging, and there were only so many designs that could be innovated. Plus not to mention the sometimes speculation-based rules, and the lack of a 2nd objective (which lead to a heavy focus on a single game piece).