Will Alliances Win?

[Raysaran]

Originally Posted by S1LK0124

Honestly- everybody is talking up how big defense is gonna be, and I gotta believe it.
But we all talk about how important it's going to be, but yet everyone is designing a robot that can score, and talking about this mysterious robot that will come from the shadows and tear apart the souls of top-take down alliances simply because it can move back and forth in a choke point. The fact of the matter is that building a purely defensive robot will NOT happen unless a team uses it as a last resort.
I can however, see high ranking alliances using it in dire situations to get the upper hand on an even higher ranking opponent. (Similar to 2016 IRI finals) The reason is simply that teams will always try to outscore the opponent until they know that they can't. That's when teams will play defense. Otherwise, defense is really more of a net loss for both sides because one team is lacking efficiency, and another is simply losing a second or two during their cycle.
The climbing is the real problem here because if a robot is trying to defend too much and can't climb, they lose a lot of points.
Now, maybe there is a bit of place for it in eliminations if they can stop some gears from being scored, but I honestly don't think that the best alliances will have one individual robot per job. They will more than likely all three be able to climb, cycle fuel, and cycle gears. Even if it meant losing 100 pts in Elims (for not getting all 4 rotors turning) an alliance could easily identify that they were losing and have a weaker alliance member go to defense to even the playing field.

Not that this long winded semi-rant is done I would like to mention-
I've only been at this for 2 years, so I could VERY easily be proven wrong, and that all of this is my opinion with experience and CD browsing to back it up. Do NOT take anything that I said to heart, just bear it in mind.

TL;DR: Somebody actually has to make a robot designed for defense to make defense effective

What typically happens is that teams that cannot score due to their mechanism not quite working properly, would be better off playing defense.

Interestingly enough, defense is more of a driver thing than it is a robot thing. For example, an experience driver would know which robots to target, how to abuse different drivetrains, angle of attack, playing defense around game obstacles, etc. I know teams that have their drive-teams perform drivers practice year round just to mess up drivers that don't have as much experience. There are teams that will scout for drivers that have bad habits/tendencies (nerve issues, etc) and then exploit them (even in quals). The best defense robots are going to be the ones that have very good strategically map awareness and very practiced drivers. Especially with the advantage that a defense bot has at the gear cycle path.

[S1LK0124]

I agree with you here- but my overall point is not that defense is entirely irrelevant, but that it likely won't be a huge important thing this year. (Or any more than any other year.) However, I would say that if there were teams with well thought-out defensive strategy, they will do quite well. (And I also know about the lack of functioning robot parts, from experience ) But I still for the most part think defense will be rare, and good defense will be even rarer, because teams with a well-thought out defensive strategy are probably good enough teams that they will be able to score with consistency.

[Big-b]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

148 showed us a video of a Regional match where they lost their shooter last season, and then turned single handedly to completely shut down a high-goal shooting alliance.

Which match was that? Is there a publicly available video of it?

[RoboAlum]

I think a lot of people are missing the point here there's nothing more important than gears and climbing. Sure the 40 kPa is big but that can be done by one robot in half the match. Those other two bots just need to place gears and climb any team that wants to play after lunch on Saturday build a robot that will do gears passively and climb but don't disregard the drivetrain 6 cims 4 inch colsons, you don't need a shifter just be around 10ft/s good speed for cycling and defense. This is the year where younger teams build for Eliminations not for qualifications you can lose all your matches but if you're consistent with your gears and climbing and can hold your own on defense any team actually scouting and thinking strategically will call your number Saturday morning.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by ThaddeusMaximus

On a (somewhat) unrelated note, I'm going to be a little mad if gears are as big of a deal as the appear to be, since the mechanisms required to do them aren't very sophisticated.

Well the mechanism might not need to be complex, augmenting that mechanism so that it will perform better is still important because it will shave time off of scoring cycles.