Strategy during Final at Einstein

[TDav540]

Originally Posted by throwaway

That's not true. OP essentially lost their ability to do outerworks shots after GTR East, if you watch Waterloo, Windsor, and Tesla that's very apparent. And while obviously the 330-2481-120 won my argument is that it would've been a much easier victory for them if they had use defense against OP.

Regardless, you're still asking 1086 and 120 to come out of their comfort zone and play a defensive role. While I'm not saying they couldn't do that, they definitely weren't used to it. In addition, while OP's outerworks shots definitely weren't the same, they still featured an accurate batter shot.

While we will probably still have our own opinions, if defense was going to be played on 2056 and 1690, it was more worthwhile to do so in the neutral zone, as previously mentioned. At least in my mind.

[Hoover]

Kudo to civilized banter; I thought it might be difficult, but this is reassuring. Nice input from teams involved so thanks. Even if we had been there we wouldn't have been able to view all the division brackets at once so there is not much back story of Einstein alliances.

Looking up some of the stats, it is hard to make the case that switching to an offensive lineup might have helped. The first thing I noted was that Carver's OPR's were significantly less than Tesla's going into Einstein. And no wonder, Carver's was the second seed alliance. (more on this later)

So from these numbers, it is harder to believe that Carver could keep up with Tesla. Therefore, defense had a significant impact on the matches.

Carver Seed 2 OPR
The Beach Bot 330 55.94
Roboteers 2481 50.96
Cleveland's Team 120 43.79
Blue Cheese 1086 43.07

Tesla Seed 1
OP Robotics 2056 68.08
Orbit 1690 69.8
Ranger Robotics 3015 36.48
Finney Falcons 1405 25.91

Speaking of OPR's it is notable that in most division the top two teams offensive rating was past the knee of the curve. Except for Newton but this has already been covered heavily on CD... but the notable thing with Newton is that almost all of those teams were upset even before Einstein. Then Newton was shut out of Einstein immediately.

However, it is more a question to my mind that more divisions are not like Newton was. Are high scoring robots on that end of the spectrum that rare, that in each division only 2 or 3 stand out even on a national level? I expect this in the districts, but nationally it is harder to rationalize.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Hoover

Looking up some of the stats, it is hard to make the case that switching to an offensive lineup might have helped. The first thing I noted was that Carver's OPR's were significantly less than Tesla's going into Einstein. And no wonder, Carver's was the second seed alliance. (more on this later)

It's quite often a bad idea to try and compare OPR across events (divisions) as a measure of expected offensive performance of specific teams on the field. Perhaps Carver was a more even / deep field than Tesla, or Tesla had a stronger top end and a weaker bottom end, etc. Lots of reasons OPR is not a good way to quantify offensive performance in this context.