900's Championship Cheesecaking Chronicles

[Citrus Dad]

If you search the posts by many 1678 mentors, you'll find that we complained about this year's game design consistently. We didn't like any of the implications of this year's game (including the bonus of taking the 3rd robot off the field to score the 4 point movement in auto.) We were upfront about our particular strategy and were among the first to come out with it at CVR. There were no surprises from us at Champs. (And then ironically, we never used a cheesecaked robot in the eliminations.)

But I am a big fan of last year's game, at least in concept (and you can find my posts on that as well). It forced the better teams to work with the newer or struggling teams to achieve an ALLIANCE goal, not just the goal of a single team. I've suggested tweaks to last year's overall game approach that could make it a model for teams to pass knowledge among themselves. Right now the incentive is to work alone in secret, not cooperatively, until we get to competitions. We can make FRC more cooperative which would reduce the incentive to cheesecake.

We've added items to our alliance mates in each of the last 3 years. In 2013, we had an FCS at CVR that had to face cheesecaked pool noodle blockers. We developed a successful counter strategy that we used again at Champs. Without the ability to add those blockers, the games would have been decided by FCS machines as soon as they got to the HP station. Thank God for cheesecake to make it competitive.

In 2014, we worked with teams to improve their ability to pass. This often meant removing their shooting mechanism. Again the teams could become much more involved given that there was a single game piece. We also made several rookie teams competitive at Champs by helping them build intakes with our extra parts that they used in all of their matches other than the ones they played with us.

When we select teams, we have two pick lists for two different roles on our alliances. In 2014 in particular, we could not have 2 shooters or 2 midfielders, even if they were the first and second best at their roles. We had to focus on what roles fit our alliance. I know that means that we are passing over some worthy robots that are particularly good at their targeted tasks, but those tasks don't fit into our alliance structure. You can't ask us to rethink our alliance strategy to fit your robot's characteristics unless it's going to improve our expectations about our alliance's performance.

The GDC can make some big changes that encourage inter-team development, which I won't repeat here. We can make all of us better with just a few thoughtful changes.