Where's the defense this year?

[Andrew]

Why aren't teams playing more defense?

First of all, defense doesn't look sexy. Many people will think, if your robot consistently goes out and stops your opponents from scoring anything, that your opponents were ineffective, not that you were very effective.

I've also seen some good defensive teams "lock into" their offensive game plan. Many teams who could be winning through playing effective defense are dropping their defense in favor of getting their scoring mechanism working. In other words, when their scoring mechanism is not working, they play defense and win matches. As soon as the mechanism comes back on line, they drop everything to go execute a score, and usually lose.

It will be interesting to see if teams at Championships continue to play the "let's get a high score" philosophy. If so, the alliance which can consistently score the most points will win CMP. Which means that CMP will be fairly predictable in terms of outcome. Ie. you'll just have to look at a teams scoring average and you'll know who is ultimately going to win.

However, if a team in the top eight realizes that they cannot outshoot the best shooter in the division and gambles on a combined offensive/defensive strategy, you may see an unlikely set of teams playing in the Championship match.

Another possible outcome is that a defensive robot goes undefeated (and they pretty much have to if they want to make it into the top 8). This is actually a fairly realistic possibility at CMP, where a defensive bot can be paired with a good offensive bot in every match. If this happens, a defensive bot in the top eight can easily pick two very good offensive alliance partners. If the rest of the field fails to realize that offense + defense is better than offense + offense, the surprise value alone may send some very good alliances back to the pits, wondering, "Why did we only score 30 points in that match?"