Is Defense key to this game?

[Dan Richardson]

While I believe defense and offense are both important each will have its place. Especially with the ramps this year. Most ramp style bots I assume will be playing defense until the final stages of a match where they will unfold and everyone will scramble for the 60 points bonus.

But in finals when the alliances are formed, what good is it to have more than 1 ramp other than maybe redundancy? The Exploding Minotaur construction is planning to have ramps, ( right now its coming down to ramps or some more effective sensory arrays ) but we also decided to go 5' 110 lbs. The reason was b/c last year 1902 was 102 lbs and was still able to play extremely effective defense. If you have a solid drive train you can play defense whoever or where ever you are. So yes strategic defense will be important, and so will be having those ramps.

It was just in our evaluation of the polls taken on delphi that when ~ 70% of the pollers said they were going to have ramps that we would concentrate on a good arm. I think at most regionals atleast 8 ramp bots will exist, and in picking for finals thats really all you need ( if thats all you do ).

I personally am excited with the way 179's bot performs from the video I've seen and you have come up in our discussions many times of strategy/scenarios. Its is a very effective way to make sure you are very highly seeded in qualifying. However if you were doing the picking, I believe it would be silly to pick another good ramp? Do you Disagree?