Winning Alliance Makeup

[Chris is me]

You guys are way off, particularly in how much will be scored in autonomous.

2014 and 2013 have spoiled teams into thinking shooting in auton is easy. In both games you had an absurdly wide goal allowing a lot of variation in where you were aiming from as long as you were roughly the same distance from the goal. In this game, you have to cross an obstacle, which most of the time consists of terrain your robot will have to climb, jump, or bounce over. This will lead to many messed up gyro calibrations, indeterminate encoder travel distances, and just a general loss of information and accuracy. The low bar may be the only exception to this.

From there, robots have to aim into a goal barely wider than the game piece they are trying to score, and make a shot. Most events will have less than 5 teams able to do this. And people seriously think two ball autons will be common? Where you have to cross over those obstacles again, grab a second ball without crossing the middle line (a lot harder to do if you've slipped your wheels on an obstacle and aren't sure exactly where your robot is), cross one more time, and shoot? If anyone is going to pull off a two ball, maybe 987 or 254 will sometimes do it, but certainly not you. It's not like 2012 where a multiple ball autonomous is possible enough that you should design your robot around being able to do it (rear intake).

I expect for the first several weeks of competition, the average "good" elims alliance will score 16 - 26 points in auton altogether. One or two teams will cross their obstacle in auton, all 3 will get the 2 point driving forward bonus, no one will score. Expecting the average robot to score 17+ points themselves regularly is just nuts. When has autonomous path planning ever been a thing within the reach of most teams?

Cheesecaked climbers might happen once or twice, but not regularly. Climbing is just too hard. Mechanisms that lift the entire robot off the ground are not something that can be hastily added to other robots at competition - they need strong and rigid mounting, well coded controls, and probably some driver practice to use. You can't lift and contort entire robots with stuff you just slapped on top of them.

My bold prediction: Not enough teams at early regionals will focus on aiming for 4 ranking points a match, every match, and thus you'll see teams that neglect the high goal seeding 1-4 at lots of early events just because they have built their whole strategy around getting the 2 bonus ranking points.