The Highest Levels of Play

[Ben Martin]

Originally Posted by marshall

This actually brings up something that is on my mind right now. When does it become necessary/advantageous for a more average team to build multiple robots to compete at both a regional/district level and at the championship level?

When you are willing to commit to the almost-every-day-after-build-season schedule that you need to get your value out of the 2nd robot.

Since the second robot is a huge time and money sink, to get the full value out of it, you need to spend a lot of time practicing with it and upgrading it. There are many teams that build the second robot, but don't execute on it right (they don't behave the same, or they don't commit to the practice schedule required to truly get mileage out of it).

I believe that teams that don't build practice robots should focus on strategies with low movement that still score good points, with a focus on minimizing the impact of driver error and on game piece control in their robot design.

In regards to the priority discussion---

Our priorities in 2013/2014 were these:
1. Win local competitions
2. Do well at world competitions

For 2015, it was:
1. Get to Einstein
--though priorities from the past years factored a lot into the design.

We always try to build robots to be the #1 pick for elimination rounds and try to include all the features that might make someone want to pick us (we had a goal to have the fastest can grabber in MAR this year, in addition to wanting to have a 3-tote auto to seed high and to score points from the landfill, since we figured it was the harder task to do and would thus be more desirable at high levels where there would be a ton of feeder station bots).