The Highest Levels of Play

[GeeTwo]

My impression of the mid-season or CMP rebuilds was that they were not being planned as of stop build day, but arose as a teams recognized that the level and/or style of competition was different than initial expectations, or perhaps the initial design never worked out as well as was hoped.

To plan to build two robots, you would probably want to design your drive base to support both configurations, and limit yourself in the second design to things which can be built from COTS and a few pounds of manufactured parts in a few hours. You would also want to build at least three drive bases: Competition, Driver practice (initial configuration), and development (second configuration, and driver practice). I would also wait until after week 2 to get serious on the build of the CMP configuration, as the game style doesn't even begin to gel until then. Do designs and maybe a prototype, but unless you have the manpower to build and tweak several designs simultaneously, hold off building until you can pick the one with confidence. Of course, you always have the option of not changing to your second design.

As you obviously have lots of people to pull this off, you may also want to have a backup drive team to help tune the second robot, if not to drive it at competition.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by The other Gabe

I disagree again:

1. Desireable
2. seed high
3. win matches

at DCMP this year, my team seeded well, 17th (I think), yet we weren't picked because our skillset didn't quite line up with what other alliances wanted. at Champs, we seeded in the 50's, but were picked as the 3rd robot because our skillset was desirable to that alliance (they all liked upright containers, and we could upright them. also canburglar. you can't control your schedule, but if you show well, you could succeed anyway

So you'd rather NOT control your destiny... ok, well, that makes 0 sense.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

The only comparisons I can come up with are total robot rebuilds, where much of the robot is rebuilt or replaced using the withholding allowance and COTS parts, and when 2826 brought an entirely new machine with them to IRI 2013.

16 made a whole new robot for 2013 IRI as well.

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

So you'd rather NOT control your destiny... ok, well, that makes 0 sense.

If you're the first seed but you're not desirable, nobody would hesitate to decline your pick. Curie 2013 and Wisconsin 2015 come to mind.

1. win matches
2. desirability
3. seed high

I have no problem with being a pick if I can consistently win matches, and being a desirable robot generally increases your likelihood of being picked by another high scoring, less in-demand robot that corresponds with your design. (landfill & feeder, trusser & finisher) Generally, winning is going to make you seed high, and you'll be desirable because you win. Just my two cents.

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

So you'd rather NOT control your destiny... ok, well, that makes 0 sense.

If you are not a top team and likely unable to build a robot capable of seeding high, it makes sense to build a robot that is desirable instead of trying (and likely failing) to build a robot that can do the necessary things to seed high.


In terms of teams building two robots to compete well at both the regional and championship level, I think we have already seen that to an extent (I don't consider the long list of teams who realized they made a design mistake and rebuilt their robot once they saw how the game was played). I don't have any examples, but I'm sure there were top teams, realizing the value of getting the cans quickly in auto at the high level of play, putting off spending too many resources into can-burglers until later in the year when they were more valuable and instead putting more of their effort in the traits that help early in the year (such as stacking and capping).

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

So you'd rather NOT control your destiny... ok, well, that makes 0 sense.

It can seem like a very reasonable line of thought when your program is relatively consistently "bad" at tournaments, and while I know you've expressed that these teams might consider another STEM program that isn't FRC, the fact is that these teams vastly outnumber "good" teams. Looking up, the odds of picking versus being picked don't look good when you've never been on the picking side.

Now, personally, I believe that trying to be in control is preferable to resigning myself to being at the mercy of the serpentine draft gods, but I can see how a reasonable person would come to a different conclusion.

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

It can seem like a very reasonable line of thought when your program is relatively consistently "bad" at tournaments, and while I know you've expressed that these teams might consider another STEM program that isn't FRC, the fact is that these teams vastly outnumber "good" teams. Looking up, the odds of picking versus being picked don't look good when you've never been on the picking side.

Now, personally, I believe that trying to be in control is preferable to resigning myself to being at the mercy of the serpentine draft gods, but I can see how a reasonable person would come to a different conclusion.

well to be fair, our robots are at least in the top half of robots at any given competition (excluding 2013), usually in the top 5 at district/ regional events. however, the scheduling gods hate us, so we are often ranked much lower than we should be. Sometimes being desirable is being a really good robot that had some bad matches and is therefore ranked low.

[Lij2015]

We didn't go to champs in 2013, my rookie year, so I had no idea what to expect but I did expect WAY more scouting than what occurred on Galileo in 2014. Seeding high is just the most important thing in trying to win an event because as we've learned first hand that if you aren't going to sell yourself you cannot trust other teams to scout. We've never really had a problem in my three years at any of the regional events as we always are pretty near the top seeds or get picked pretty early, but we always seem to get absolutely amazing second picks from really high seeds(looking at 623, 4050, 2068 and 1610 here) that really should have gone WAY earlier.

2481 was easily the 4th best robot and maybe even tied for 3rd on Galileo in 2014 and was the 2nd pick of the 5th seeded alliance, seriously? Same with this year as well on Archimedes, there was no reason 314 or 3996(especially 3996 with how late they went) should have fallen that far: 2nd pick of the 8th seed and 2nd pick of the 1st seed respectively.

Even more so at regional events for some teams however, considering we attend events that often have really weird seeding when you get past the 3rd or 4th position. You might feel like you have a great robot but you seriously just cannot trust teams to scout.

[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.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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?

I thought the same thing; that the inverted and step totes would matter on Einstein. When the two alliances split the cans 5 and 5, then making 7 stacks of 6 isn't enough if the alliance on the other side of the step can make 9.

I thought that the "top 8" threshold for a typical regional would be a bit lower (regularly scoring about 50 tote+RC points), but that the alliances heading to Einstein would be stronger, needing to score inverted and/or step totes to beat the others on Einstein.

[EricH]

My team doesn't worry about how the game will play at the highest levels. We figure the odds of our getting there aren't good enough to need to be worried.

Instead, we focus on how we can bring our highest level of play to the game--and hopefully get those odds higher and higher.


Because of that, extreme high-level play is tagged with "godbot" when used in strategy discussions, and used primarily to figure out how to get picked as an ally to such teams, as well as to help determine a more achievable play level for our robot to have--but still a stretch. For example, if we think that Poofs will score 4 noodled 6-stacks/match, we'll be targeting more on the order of 2 noodled 5-stacks and one totes-only 5 stack. (I don't remember exactly what we figured for this year--but it was something along those lines.)

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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?

Actually, yeah, I did.
My assumption for the best alliance in the world at the beginning of build season was:
Human Player Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the human player station
Landfill Stacker; Capable of making 4-5 stacks uncapped from the landfill
Capper; Capable of capping 5-7 stacks
I figured the best landfill robots in the world would be able to make stacks out of upside-down or step totes to come up with the extra landfill stacks.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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!)

Catching was lower on our priority list than almost all other functionality in 2014, but we executed on the other functionalities on our list, so it worked out. But at the beginning of build season, I believed that ideally a robot-robot catch at the highest levels would take the same amount of time as trussing to the human player and having them load the ball into the robot. We had a few catching cycles in Archimedes Qualifications 2014 that were our fastest cycles of the day, because we caught the ball, turned around, and made the shot.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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!

Climbs ended up being a difference-maker at IRI, but had 1986 or 254 attended IRI, we could have seen an alliance with three climbs and a 7-disc auto, and a centerline auto. That's what I expected the highest levels to be. Almost every disc and climb possible scored.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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.

For the record, I was a sophomore at the time.
We did terrible prototyping in 2012 under extremely controlled conditions where we used the exact same ball to make the shots because for some reason we thought balls at competition would be more consistent. That came down to me not understanding how engineering worked at the time.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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.

Thank you, Chris, for responding in a constructive way about the subject matter I intended to discuss. It was interesting.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

It can seem like a very reasonable line of thought when your program is relatively consistently "bad" at tournaments, and while I know you've expressed that these teams might consider another STEM program that isn't FRC, the fact is that these teams vastly outnumber "good" teams. Looking up, the odds of picking versus being picked don't look good when you've never been on the picking side.

Now, personally, I believe that trying to be in control is preferable to resigning myself to being at the mercy of the serpentine draft gods, but I can see how a reasonable person would come to a different conclusion.

Thread Title: Highest Levels of Play
Current Discussion Topic: Strategic Decision Making for "bad" teams.

Andrew is confused.
Andrew hurt himself in his confusion.

Ignoring the whole concept of resigning yourself to mediocrity and how that's bad... the topic is how to predict what high levels of play are going to look like. In essence, we're asking "What Would Beatty Do?" So, discussing what "bad" teams do/should do is pointless.

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Thread Title: Highest Levels of Play
Current Discussion Topic: Strategic Decision Making for "bad" teams.

Andrew is confused.
Andrew hurt himself in his confusion.

Ignoring the whole concept of resigning yourself to mediocrity and how that's bad... the topic is how to predict what high levels of play are going to look like. In essence, we're asking "What Would Beatty Do?" So, discussing what "bad" teams do/should do is pointless.

I agree with you for the most part about this topic being way off base.

However, there is an argument for not caring about seeding highly to compete at the highest levels of play. Let's say you're a low resource team in 2012 who wants to compete with the best. Should you attempt to build a top-tier scorer so you can maybe seed (even though that was NOT an easy thing to do that year), or should you build a wide feeder bot in hopes of being a desirable third robot.

For teams looking to compete at any level, priorities could be different than yours or mine.

[iVanDuzer]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

I agree with you for the most part about this topic being way off base.

However, there is an argument for not caring about seeding highly to compete at the highest levels of play. Let's say you're a low resource team in 2012 who wants to compete with the best. Should you attempt to build a top-tier scorer so you can maybe seed (even though that was NOT an easy thing to do that year), or should you build a wide feeder bot in hopes of being a desirable third robot.

For teams looking to compete at any level, priorities could be different than yours or mine.

You build 4334 and win your division and IRI. (and also the coopertition award at your regional and your division).

ATA identified the highest level of competition and built a tiny robot that could steal balls and make it so two long robots could triple balance. They did this with a robot made mostly out of 80-20. I also want to point out that they seeded pretty well: 13th at GTRE and 16th on a really deep Archimedes field. For all intents and purposes, they tried their best to control their fate (which is pretty admirable for a robot that couldn't score any balls).

This case study just shows that it's possible to: analyze the game to identify the highest level of competition, realize you can't be a "main" robot at that level, identify a niche on the ideal alliance, build for that niche, while also not sacrificing seeding ability. 4334 built a simple robot that seeded a lot higher than plenty of ball-scoring robots, because they figured the game out.

[Lil' Lavery]

The best robot in the world in 2012 was built mostly of 80/20.
http://www.thebluealliance.com/team/341/2012