Wall 'o Boxes

[Solace]

Originally posted by M. Krass
No, I didn't attend the scrimmage (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express? )...I saw the video, though.

The one thing I am definitely reserving judgement on is the autonomous mode. I don't think the programming was in a state to be judged at that scrimmage.

Believe me, I don't think that king of the hill robots can't be beat. In fact, I'm banking on most of them getting creamed. But, overall, I'm just disappointed with the way the game's been playing out.

Rather than "descore" the opponent's bins, why not take them with you? By pushing them out of scoring position, you can manage to control the score, but all destructive forms of scoring lower the matches net QPs. The real winners are going to be the people that can keep the scores close, but do so by adding to their score while they're lowering the opponent's score.

That's my feeling, anyway. Or, it'll be a complete wasteland and bins will mean nothing at all.

We probably agree about more than you think. After all, our robots aren't too dissimilar.

Haha, yeah, they are kinda the same - with the small exception that yours is made out of aluminum and therefore doesn't look quite as jury-rigged.

Believe me, I would have loved to be able to move bins en masse to the other side of the field, but doing that - unless you have a robot the can push some outrageously large number of bins at once - simply takes too much time to be truly effective. Trying to engineer a close match is fine if your ahead, but if you're trying to play catchup because you weren't quite fast enough to the wall then simply winning the round will be the top thing on your mind.

Another problem with relocating the bins to your side of the field is that it is a tactic easily intercepted. If you can't move them over the bar in large numbers (something that I expect very few teams will be able to do), then it is quite easy for an opponent to ram you coming from the opposite direction (assuming that you have expanded your profile in order to push more bins).

But hey, just 11 more days and all our questions will be (for the most part) answered.