A video guide to playing shutdown defense in Stronghold

[Clayton Summerall]

Originally Posted by Landonh12

Something I noticed from the videos - you guys didn't really try to get shots from the sides of the castle. It seemed like the defensive robot just kind of sat near the middle batter and it disrupted your drivers.

Is your robot able to make side batter shots? I think that the defense wouldn't have been so bad if you guys tried the sides.

We can make it from the sides but without having practice with a defense bot our drivers didn't know what to do to over come the defense.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by lethc

Did you watch the videos? 4587 (an excellent high goal scorer) went from scoring 4-5 high goals per match to only scoring 2 with defense played on them. Defense forced them to play the role of outerworks shooter which they weren't used to, and they only made one of the two outerworks shots they took.

Defense against a robot that doesn't regularly shoot from the outerworks significantly disrupts their offensive flow and forces them to play the game in a way that they aren't comfortable with.

4587 was constantly scoring 3-4 RP per match with no defense played against them and scored 0 RP when 2461 defended them.

I guess I'm not understanding how good defense is easy to overcome if you don't shoot from the outerworks, most of the videos in the OP show otherwise.

Let's run a mixup!

Lets say that in Q72 a mixup was run where instead of immediately taking shots with boulders the blue alliance focused on breaching, BUT every time they crossed a defense to weaken it they also took a boulder and just plopped it in the courtyard. Until they are done with the breaches 2461s current strategy which is heavy batter defense is useless because points are still being scored and they aren't slowing anything down they are literally sitting doing nothing.
This accomplishes 2 things, it gets the breaching out of the way for those RP or in elims gives that nice point cushion and it also pressurizes the courtyard for a nice little explosion as soon as breaches are done.
As soon as those breaches are done though its 2461s time to shine by blocking shots right? Well kind of... You will notice in the flow of the match 2461 has time to posture properly for defense because the opposing alliance has to go retrieve boulders from the neutral or wherever it ended up in the courtyard. If you run the mixup where the boulders are flooded in the courtyard you give 2461 a lot less time to posture and be in the right place at the right time to block the right goals. 2461 only really had to block one robot at a time.
Do you notice how much time 4587 spends having to retrieve a ball and then park and then shoot? Can you see how much time they save where instead of having to constantly cross the outerworks they could just take a shot move a few feet pickup another ball and take another shot? Welcome to volume of fire where accuracy matters less because you have more to start out with. This is when you cash in the pressure and your 3 free robots start rushing shots into goals. You have 5 goals to choose from and one robot to defend them all, and that robot can't be everywhere at once and 1 defensive robot vs 3 offensive robots can get pretty ugly.
Thats only half the fun of creating that pressure though. If at any point in the match the red alliance finds that the only boulders left on the field that they need to take shots are in their courtyard they run into an interesting predicament. Only one robot is allowed in their own courtyard at a time and currently that robot is busy trying to stop a team who is spraying and praying with boulders.

What can the red alliance do?
If they try to regain control by taking boulders out they have to do it one at a time and they have to risk sending in one of the scoring robots into the courtyard where they can be pinned and suppressed by the 2-3 opposing robots.
If they try and respond by breaching then they are just trading time since the blue alliance has already done the breaches they need.

What would you do in this situation if you were on the red alliance?

TLDR: If you choose to play someone at the game they designed for expect to lose.

[lethc]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Let's run a mixup!

Lets say that in Q72 a mixup was run where instead of immediately taking shots with boulders the blue alliance focused on breaching, BUT every time they crossed a defense to weaken it they also took a boulder and just plopped it in the courtyard. Until they are done with the breaches 2461s current strategy which is heavy batter defense is useless because points are still being scored and they aren't slowing anything down they are literally sitting doing nothing.
This accomplishes 2 things, it gets the breaching out of the way for those RP or in elims gives that nice point cushion and it also pressurizes the courtyard for a nice little explosion as soon as breaches are done.
As soon as those breaches are done though its 2461s time to shine by blocking shots right? Well kind of... You will notice in the flow of the match 2461 has time to posture properly for defense because the opposing alliance has to go retrieve boulders from the neutral or wherever it ended up in the courtyard. If you run the mixup where the boulders are flooded in the courtyard you give 2461 a lot less time to posture and be in the right place at the right time to block the right goals. 2461 only really had to block one robot at a time.
Do you notice how much time 4587 spends having to retrieve a ball and then park and then shoot? Can you see how much time they save where instead of having to constantly cross the outerworks they could just take a shot move a few feet pickup another ball and take another shot? Welcome to volume of fire where accuracy matters less because you have more to start out with. This is when you cash in the pressure and your 3 free robots start rushing shots into goals. You have 5 goals to choose from and one robot to defend them all, and that robot can't be everywhere at once and 1 defensive robot vs 3 offensive robots can get pretty ugly.
Thats only half the fun of creating that pressure though. If at any point in the match the red alliance finds that the only boulders left on the field that they need to take shots are in their courtyard they run into an interesting predicament. Only one robot is allowed in their own courtyard at a time and currently that robot is busy trying to stop a team who is spraying and praying with boulders.

What can the red alliance do?
If they try to regain control by taking boulders out they have to do it one at a time and they have to risk sending in one of the scoring robots into the courtyard where they can be pinned and suppressed by the 2-3 opposing robots.
If they try and respond by breaching then they are just trading time since the blue alliance has already done the breaches they need.

What would you do in this situation if you were on the red alliance?

TLDR: If you choose to play someone at the game they designed for expect to lose.

Yeah I think you're overestimating the skill of the robots that play this game. Sure in a perfect world where robots can consistently pickup and spit out balls while also crossing defenses quickly your strategy would work. I just don't think that many alliances this year will actually have the capability to score 5-6 boulders in the low goal in like 60 seconds while also leaving enough time to challenge the tower. Your strategy assumes 3 relatively perfect offensive robots in terms of consistency, time and shooting accuracy, and simply put that alliance will almost never come together at any point in time this year especially at the regional level.

I also want to add that there was no point in time where red actually lost control of the match. They scored 8 high goals including 2 in autonomous, which was enough to weaken the tower and secure the capture. If your strategy relies on sacrificing the points of high goals to score low goals in order to weaken the tower then so be it, but don't expect to beat a team that consistently scores high goals.

[Alex Cormier]

Originally Posted by Louisiana Jones

The Finger Lakes Regional Thread also mentioned 1405's excellent defense, but I can't seem to find any video's. Did anyone who was there film matches for scouting that they could share?

There's some stock footage with the link in the FLR thread. I am having our sweet video team put up their footage of our stellar defense soon. In the mean time, they put together a recap video. It shows some of the big hits and all. http://youtu.be/XdksEhzAD0E

A large part of the time we were actually hitting and stopping two robots at once. Sometimes even all three, rarely one robot. It was great to see my driver do so well and play so smart. Over all the eliminations (6 wins, 0 loses) we only received two penalties.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by lethc

Yeah I think you're overestimating the skill of the robots that play this game. Sure in a perfect world where robots can consistently pickup and spit out balls while also crossing defenses quickly your strategy would work. I just don't think that many alliances this year will actually have the capability to score 5-6 boulders in the low goal in like 60 seconds while also leaving enough time to challenge the tower. Your strategy assumes 3 relatively perfect offensive robots in terms of consistency, time and shooting accuracy, and simply put that alliance will almost never come together at any point in time this year especially at the regional level.

I also want to add that there was no point in time where red actually lost control of the match. They scored 8 high goals including 2 in teleop, which was enough to weaken the tower and secure the capture. If your strategy relies on sacrificing the points of high goals to score low goals in order to weaken the tower then so be it, but don't expect to beat a team that consistently scores high goals.

Actually no I was assuming two strong offensive robots and one robot running secret passage to low bar to make sure the excess boulders in the castle don't go to the opposing alliance. That alliance where two fantastic robots are together with a third robot that is flexible is whats generally known as the number one alliance (standard serpentine pick #1 rank team picks #2 rank team and their third pick is usually a good drive base with good drivers). Again the strategy trades accuracy for volume of fire and if you run a low goal high goal combo every missed shot a high goal takes can be cleaned up by the low bot if the high goal shooter is being defended on (at which point the low goal robot has a free courtyard to run those 5-6 low goals). As for red losing control of the match I posed "what if it happened" not that it did and the point still stands if the mix up I proposed was executed and at any point the side with the defensive robot lost resource control what would you do? I also at no point said you only score low goals in fact if we want to add kiting into the strategy we can have tons of fun where we run a low goal robot to the secret passage low goal which makes it that juicy robot that if it accidentally enters the secret passage can get tagged for points, and a high goal robot shooting closer towards the spy box with the human player to assist with aiming (which is a major threat) at which point you are hitting two sides of a tower and a defensive robot can't cover both the low goal of one side of the tower and the remaining goals on the opposite side of the tower.

[Bryce2471]

What would you do in this situation if you were on the red alliance?

Steadily cross blue outer works, obtain a boulder, cross back, shoot from outer works, rinse, repeat.

As cool as your proposed strategy sounds, I don't think it can be successful on the field.

Any strategy that requires each boulder be manipulated more than once will be significantly less efficient.

The issue of having all the boulders in the red courtyard can be mitigated by having the robot on defense shuttle some into the red secret passage while they are waiting around.

Even if there were enough boulders for a capture in the red courtyard after the outer works were breached, the blue alliance would have more trouble scoring them than you think. With four robots all running around in the tight quarters of the coutyard, blue alliance would be seriously hindered by the traffic, let alone the defense bot.

[lethc]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Actually no I was assuming two strong offensive robots and one robot running secret passage to low bar to make sure the excess boulders in the castle don't go to the opposing alliance. That alliance where two fantastic robots are together with a third robot that is flexible is whats generally known as the number one alliance (standard serpentine pick #1 rank team picks #2 rank team and their third pick is usually a good drive base with good drivers). Again the strategy trades accuracy for volume of fire and if you run a low goal high goal combo every missed shot a high goal takes can be cleaned up by the low bot if the high goal shooter is being defended on (at which point the low goal robot has a free courtyard to run those 5-6 low goals). As for red losing control of the match I posed "what if it happened" not that it did and the point still stands if the mix up I proposed was executed and at any point the side with the defensive robot lost resource control what would you do? I also at no point said you only score low goals in fact if we want to add kiting into the strategy we can have tons of fun where we run a low goal robot to the secret passage low goal which makes it that juicy robot that if it accidentally enters the secret passage can get tagged for points, and a high goal robot shooting closer towards the spy box with the human player to assist with aiming (which is a major threat) at which point you are hitting two sides of a tower and a defensive robot can't cover both the low goal of one side of the tower and the remaining goals on the opposite side of the tower.

All of these complicated strategies go into trying to beat an alliance that has consistent outerworks high goal shooters which have dominated the regionals they've went to so far (118, 1986, 16, 2056, 1114). You even said it at the end of your post, trying to beat teams at their own game rarely works. On top of all that, at the end of the day teams with consistent high goal shots will always end up outscoring alliances that choose to make low goals a primary component of their offense.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Bryce2471

Steadily cross blue outer works, obtain a boulder, cross back, shoot from outer works, rinse, repeat.

As cool as your proposed strategy sounds, I don't think it can be successful on the field.

Any strategy that requires each boulder be manipulated more than once will be significantly less efficient.

The issue of having all the boulders in the red courtyard can be mitigated by having the robot on defense shuttle some into the red secret passage while they are waiting around.

Even if there were enough boulders for a capture in the red courtyard after the outer works were breached, the blue alliance would have more trouble scoring them than you think. With four robots all running around in the tight quarters of the coutyard, blue alliance would be seriously hindered by the traffic, let alone the defense bot.

I will agree that it could be a serious traffic jam. However if we apply the rule "Any strategy that requires each boulder be manipulated more than once will be significantly less efficient." then you need to apply it to the entire playing field too. If a defensive bot counters the mixup by shuttling it needs to either manually push the ball to the secret passage or intake the ball and then place the ball back on the field in the secret passage in a way that is clear to the refs that it isn't launching, this would also put them out of position for defending (it can't move a boulder to the secret passage and block a shot at the same time), and also isn't actually moving the game piece to where its needed nor is it in really a safe spot (nothing stops the opposing team from trying to take it back). When you mix shuttling with breaching the boulder goes where its needed (in the courtyard) while adding minimal time to scoring cycles. If you have seen a secret passage jammed with boulders its a lot harder for the human player to get a boulder down to the neutral when its got a bunch of shots in the way.
Either way the way you countered the mixup is by taking the robot you had intentionally run as a defensive bot, and converted it into a different role which still eliminates the "defensive shut down".

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by lethc

All of these complicated strategies go into trying to beat an alliance that has consistent outerworks high goal shooters which have dominated the regionals they've went to so far (118, 1986, 16, 2056, 1114). You even said it at the end of your post, trying to beat teams at their own game rarely works. On top of all that, at the end of the day teams with consistent high goal shots will always end up outscoring alliances that choose to make low goals a primary component of their offense.

The strategies I brought up were aimed at countering wall bots and this idea that a wall bot can defensively shut down a team. I wouldn't run the anti wall bot mix-up on an outerworks shooter that'd be silly. My point is that just because a team has a wall bot doesn't mean you should be worried about being defensively shut down.

[Louisiana Jones]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

My point is that just because a team has a wall bot doesn't mean you should be worried about being defensively shut down.

If my robot couldn't shoot from the outerworks then I would be very worried about even an average defensive robot. Dropping off boulder's in the courtyard is not going to make it easier to score them, and the defensive robot easily pushes those out of the way and into the secret passage without even missing a beat.

[Dezion]

Originally Posted by Louisiana Jones

The following videos shows 5098 defending against the 5th seeded alliance who had breached and captured in both their QF matches to move into the semifinal matches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMiPcmWgq0Q

Does anyone know what the penalty at 1:50 is for?

[waialua359]

Tune your robots to fire over 4 1/2 ft blockers from the Outerworks folks. And drop your appendage if you have to, to create more space between the defender and your robot.
If you have a low robot linear shooter, that will definitely present some problems as we saw this past week at some events. Everyone should have seen that coming though.

[Louisiana Jones]

Originally Posted by Dezion

Does anyone know what the penalty at 1:50 is for?

We asked because this was called twice, and the penalty was overturned because the side official was confused about a rule. In short there was no foul there.

[Dezion]

Originally Posted by Louisiana Jones

We asked because this was called twice, and the penalty was overturned because the side official was confused about a rule. In short there was no foul there.

Ah. Thank you.

[Cash4587]

I cannot stress enough how important it is to practice with defense. Defense this year is real, and it is tough. The match video above was the first time our drivers had ever seen defense. As you can tell it really, really works. At that point in time we had not tuned our outer works shot and had not practiced low goals. Both of those are extremely important to make sure you can do if you want to be successful in eliminations. 4587 for sure will be focusing on overcoming defense and scoring in autonomous in the coming weeks. Thanks 1806 for opening our eyes about defense and thanks for being incredible alliance partners, we had a blast. See you guys at champs!