The Highest Levels of Play

[Chris is me]

I think the best way to actually answer Kevin original question - how can you predict what's going to matter in high level play? - would be to analyze past mistakes and see what things your analysis is missing, then focus on strengthening those missing areas. In a way it seems like it's not a matter of going "what's going to be the most important?" as much as "is this game task going to matter, how much?".

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

In 2015 I believed that independent stackers and cappers could be competitive at the highest levels, and that step totes would be needed.

Full disclosure: I thought there was more of a place for an independent stacker this year than there was.

I think the most obvious thing missed with a specialist alliance versus an all around alliance is that the specialist alliance basically must work slower. Stackers (for the most part) remain just as good at stacking whether or not they manipulate a can. They take barely any time at all to get a can on top, and then from there it is just as fast to build a stack. Also important is that the time investment involved for most stackers to get a can in position is BEFORE building a stack, not after. A pure stacker is not really doing much more tote stacking than a stack and cap robot, and a pure capper is most certainly not using its time as efficiently either.

This was an easy thing to call wrong this year; in basically every other FRC game there was a strong argument for specializing on tasks. This year was kind of the perfect storm against specialization - the same manipulators could stack totes and bins, so there wasn't much compromised in going for both. It was actually faster all around to score both, as well. In almost any other game, building an all around robot involves some big design compromises, the "jack of all trades is the master of none" principle of splitting engineering load, etc. etc.

As for step totes, I'll be straight, I have no idea why you thought they were important at all. Did you think seven stacks from the HP and / or landfill wouldn't be enough?

In 2014 I believed that trussing to a catch would be necessary at the highest levels,.

First I want to say that this is something a lot of teams "called wrong" in the sense that they spent some design effort on being able to perform catches when they really didn't need to. Teams like 254, 2056, 469, 1114, 118, etc. all came out of the gate with catching features on their robots. However, these teams all properly evaluated the game and determined that this task was the lowest priority. This decision meant that other game tasks drove their design and catching was more tacked on at the end.

The choice to make catching a lower priority was fairly obvious from the game layout. In a cycle game, what's less important than points per cycle is the overall rate of scoring. Catching adds 10 points to a cycle, enough that five catching cycles is the equivalent of six non catching cycles. Six cycles in roughly 2 minutes is roughly 20 seconds a cycle; five cycles is roughly 25 seconds a cycle. Does a good catch add less than 5 seconds to a cycle? Defense on both sides of the equation, the relatively narrow target for the ball to land in, the swiftness and ease of trussing in the vague general direction of the undefendable human player, all of these factors worked against catching from the beginning. Properly identifying the truss to human player strategy, the somewhat awkward role of a second-assist midfield robot, and being realistic about defense are what was necessary to see that catch just wasn't going to happen. (Stop trying to make catch happen!)

In 2013 I believed that all three robots on the winning alliance at the highest levels would need to be able to execute a 30 point climb.

More than anything else, the 30 point climb was just incredibly difficult. First realize that a 30 point climb is +20 points over a normal robot since robots of any sort should be able to hang for 10. Second, an additional cycle is 12 points. It's far, far less effort to make a robot that you already need to make good at shooting discs a bit faster than it is to build one of the hardest mechanisms in FIRST history. Ultimately, the 30 point climb received its proper time in the spotlight as a difference maker in the IRI eliminations - but this is when every capable alliance was draining the human player station already!

In 2012 I believed that robots would be able to accurately (>50%) shoot from their protected alleys on the opposite side of the field as their goals.

The problem here isn't strategy, it's that you were just making stuff up really. Don't worry, we were all freshmen once. But seriously - we talk a lot about strategy before design, but that doesn't necessarily mean committing to a strategy before prototyping. Learning how foam balls would travel differently over longer distances required putting them in wheeled shooters and letting them fly, at which point it would be pretty obvious that range beyond the key would be at best difficult.

So what are the common themes here? A lot of times it's hard to judge what teams are capable of building. This gets easier with experience, but oftentimes trying it yourself is the fastest way to find out if it's really possible. And don't be afraid to revise strategic decisions after learning it wasn't as easy as you guessed - way too many teams don't do this.

In your other cases, it seemed you didn't have a good grasp of match flow and how that effects what designs work best. How easy the task is to complete, how seamlessly it integrates itself into other strategies, how much coordination is required to pull off the task, how "worth it" the task is, all of these considerations are important. Think about what matches without that feature and what matches with that feature would look like. What would the alliance without the feature do to compensate? It's not always as simple as "score a little bit more in other ways".

Hope this wasn't a totally useless post.