Week 1: Thoughts, comments

[Faith]

Originally Posted by platypus

I posted these thoughts after day 1 at the BAE Granite State Regional:


After Saturday, here are my additional comments/revisions:

1. Like I mentioned after Friday, autonomous is so important for the very reason that you aren't covered. The only exception to what I posted before is what team 1276 did: they climbed the opponent's ramp and shot from there. This gave them perfect accuracy, while at the same time making them undependable. Many teams could not climb the ramp at all, and while they pretty much all could in the elimination rounds, none were really built to climb it easily (it's just such a deceptively hard task). They had absolutely forever to take their shots but at the same time did not need long to line up and take them. As far as I know, they only had a defensive autonomous mode, but it didn't matter because they just picked shooters with strong autonomous modes for their alliance, which let them interfere with the opponent's autonomous while their alliance took its own shots. They would be the only team to score anything of note in the rest of the game (as a result, their alliance swept in all their elimination matches easily to win the regional). My congratulations to team 1276 on solving this years game!

If you look at the videos of the semifinals and finals of BAE(those are the only ones I've found so far), which had a link posted earlier and can be found at http://www.team195.com/video/BAE2K6/ you can look at 1276's strategy and how people attempted to defend them. If you look, other robots only tried blocking them during two matches. The first of those matches 1276 DID NOT get up the ramp and score- they were successfully blocked from accomplishing that. The second of those two matches was a failure, because although the other team tried to defend them they actually pushed 1276 up the ramp a little, jostling them but from the wrong direction and helping rather then hindering.

In conclusion, I believe that although 1276 was brilliant and their strategy very good, it is easy enough to block with either
a) A robot on the ramp pushing them (I think)
or
b) A big robot or two that blocks them before they get on the ramp.