How 492 won the PAC NW regionals

[Ethulin]

Something is very different in this years game than the my knowledge has never happened before (or at least no recently).

3v3.

Though this seems like a pretty obvious thing, very few teams took it into account any way other than robot design, which even then only a few did.

Don't get me wrong, team 492 's bot Tyr was a very well designed bot, and I believe with that alone we could have placed very highly, it is not what made us win the Pacific NW regional almost unchallenged.

No, I would attribute our sweep of the PAC-NW to two other, though often overlooked, reasons, namely scouting and strategy.

Scouting:
To get truly accurate data people had to change their scouting this year. With a 3v3 game match ranking was just a horrible way to judge teams. So we made our own.

492's scouting this year I have to say was the best that I myself personally have ever seen. As soon as our robot was shipped we started working on our scouting application. We made a php based scouting application that allowed our scouts to input data from every match. Here is a screen shot:
http://trc.freedomdown.net/scout1.gif
We then coded a php info script too allow us to make sense of all our raw data. Screen shot:
http://trc.freedomdown.net/scout2.gif
In the app you can sort be what ever you want, call up data on what ever team you want etc.

At regionals we set up a wifi network with a laptop server running in the stands.

We assigned 4 team members full time scout duty. These members dutifly recorded data for every match in the entire regional.

This allowed us to find the truly two best teams in the regional to partner up with, team 1595 and team 604. Due to 604s ranking they were not picked as first pick by any other team, even though they were one of the best. We ended up getting our first two picks, and getting an owning alliance due too our scouting.

Strategy:
Sadly not until after nationals can I really go into what strategies we used that made our alliance so effective, but all I really can say is that with this 3v3 game, it changes allot. You have to know how to exploit being able to use all 3 robots at once to do different things, not have everyone trying to do the same.
One of the reasons that 604 had not done to hot before finals even though they had a really nice bot and very good driving is that they had no method to their madness, they could cap very well but just didn't know where. When we hooked up with them for the finals we made this all very clear.

Shout out too 1595 and 604, you guys were some rocking alliance partners, able to get a 40-40 tie going 2v3 without is in finals!