[Official 2007 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions

[Dave Scheck]

Originally Posted by Donut

...and forcing teams to announce what they will be doing before autonomous will give away their goal, not something I want my opponent to know for their defensive autonomous.

Who said there was defense? The only reason that defense was so prominent this year is because the field was wide open and it was possible to have robot interaction. 2005 didn't have defense because robots couldn't interact (with maybe the exception of somebody blocking a middle row goal). 2004 didn't have defense because the task at hand was inherently offensive. 2003 was the same way...the only real way to defend other than to drive under the bar or chase stacks was to get to the stack first.

If you keep them the same time then the difficult tasks are more difficult because it's more to do in the same time; by increasing the time for harder tasks you remove a large part of the difficulty from them (time is usually the biggest problem in autonomous mode).

I agree that time is usually the problem, but why not allot just enough time for teams to actually succeed at the task at hand? In 2005, if there were another 2 or 3 seconds, I think that there would have been some center goal capping. I would much rather watch a game where teams are successful at doing something autonomously than watching a game where they almost get it done.