Is Defense key to this game?

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I'd still be careful judging this game based on the week 1 and week 2 results. Art raises what is probably the most correct post so far. It's all about determining what will get you the best net score at that time. And often (if climbed properly) the bonus points for each alliance can and would negate each other, leaving the game to whoever won the rack.
Defense tends to become very lax in the last 25-30 seconds of any given game, as teams go back to deploy and climb on each other. That is where many of the best scorers quickly made up points lost to defense earlier. 25, 103, and 1302 are probably the best example of this. That alliance would typically get a few ringers up while being defended, but then they'd place 4 or 5 in the last quarter of the match as the other alliance attempted bonus points. End result? NJ Regional Champions. The same can be seen with many of my team's victories. We were unfortunate to be paired against one of the top 3 defensive teams at VCU (122) every match. They greatly hampered our scoring, but when they went back for bonus points, we'd quickly score a ringer or two, then get our own bonus points, resulting in 32-30, or 36-30 type victories.
Also, I saw several times that defensive bots got scored over at VCU.



By the opponent having 2 or 3 tube scoring machines. Especially when they can step up their offense after the ramp bot goes back to deploy and/or if they can get on their own ramp bot.

Our arm broke in attempting to score in the finals match in NJ which would have made the score from 132 to 16 in that respective row for our opponent. Had that been on, I think we would have won. In match #1, they scored all 8, we put on a spoiler and our teammate was supposed to put on a spoiler on the other side of the rack. Their arm broke also. Our 3rd partner had no arm the entire playoffs and just played defense.
For team 25 to come up to us and say it was pretty scary and that they almost lost says a lot. When spectators only look at the final score, it doesnt tell the whole story. Its what really happened until the end. This game is an exponential scoring game which can dramatically change in an instant with a spoiler. I cant confirm this, but 3 spoilers were put on the entire NJ regional. We were involved in ALL of them whether we did it or it was done to us, I think. We knew to focus on the bottom and lower rows since their alliance partners did only those rows and not the top. Now, I know the end result was that we lost, but all I'm saying is that it just depends and scores dont tell the whole story. Our strategy proved effective against the #2 and #3 seeded teams, who IMO, were awesome scorers!
My point: DEFENSE is important, STRATEGY is important, AWESOME scorers can be stopped, enough to win, and bonus point scoring is high with up to 60 points maximum. Just my opinion compared to last year's game. Team 25 is the exception that we saw, plain and simple.