Defense comprimise ideas

[Dan Petrovic]

This is one of the reasons why 2005's game, Triple Play, remains my favorite game to date.

While de-scoring tetras wasn't allowed, disrupting a row of goals owned by the opposing alliance would lower their score. Superior driving and strategy were the keys to Triple Play, not top-notch engineering.

Being able to negate the efforts of your opponents is probably the cleanest way for FIRST to incorporate defense into their games. However, now that I think about it, this is the first year since 2008 in that a team could de-score previously scored game pieces. Before then, being able to take away opponents' points had more or less been a staple of FIRST games.

2007 - Spoiler tubes
2006 - N/A
2005 - Eliminating goal rows
2004 - Removing doubling balls
2003 - Knocking down stacks or plowing boxes out of scoring zones
2002 - Moving goals out of your opponent's goal scoring zone
2001 - N/A
2000 - Removing balls from your opponent's goal

It just comes down to the GDC being willing to incorporate such defensive strategies into their games and to make them worth pursuing.