Defense is Back in a Big (Good) Way

[GeeTwo]

With the protection offered to robots transiting the outer works, a good sapper 'bot should be able to breach the defenses solo, or only with the support of its alliance partners cycling boulders through their favorite defense. You can only get points for ten defense crossings; there is very little reason to have a second robot with a primary mission to breach defenses.

The only "unlimited points" (that is points limited mostly by cycle time) are boulders. Once breach is assured, the next pivot point is scoring boulders, with the major benefit of weakening the tower so that it can be captured, but an essentially open problem as far as "how many" points you can score.

The next pivot point is defense. As we expected, this is only a significant consideration during elims in early weeks. I predict that it will slowly become more important during quals through week 5, but become rather important in week 6 and quite important during district CMPs and CMP.

I expect that in later weeks and at CMP, that there shall be a designated defense robot and two robots focused on the breach and weakening the tower. At lower levels, there will be one robot assigned to each function, but at the higher levels, breaching will be a side effect of weakening the tower. This should be especially effective as the two offensive robots are able to run interference for each other against the defensive robot of the opposing alliance. I expect that at the very highest levels, teams will coordinate their crossings to further reduce the effect of defense.