[Official 2005 Game Design] Radical Tournament Ideas

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by Billfred

(which takes longer than :30, trust me)

By field reset, I meant that the players would return their robot to the starting zone. The rest of the field would remain in the state where it ended.

Originally Posted by Billfred

then trust me--the field will be disturbed, especially if it's anything like this year.

Good point. It would depend on what the field was like. I wasn't thinking about many balls or bins strewn about the field. There could always be a penalty for upsetting the field balance.

If you consider that a team cannot get their bot back to start in :30, then they would receive a delay of game penalty. In other words, you should be thinking about getting your robot back "home" between plays. So, the last :10 of each play would probably be robots heading back "home" similar to 2002's game.

This kind of game may also require more human players. The HP role could be purely getting the robot back into position between plays. You might need 5 players in such a case (driver, manipulator, coach, HP reset 1, HP reset 2).

I realize that such a match structure would mean fewer matches per tournament. However, you would have more match time per match. Overall, you would probably get more match time with a longer match sequence than with more shorter matches, where significant time is consumed by setting up the playing field and getting robots/teams into position.