Week 3 Impressions of Rack n' Roll

[Adamskiy]

At Peachtree, they basically required that all teams at least be initially inspected by 6pm Thursday, to provide time to fix/change whatever necessary and get re-inspected Friday morning. In all of our qualification matches, we never had an alliance partner that had not yet passed inspection...in fact, I don't remember ever seeing a QM with less than 6 robots on the field. Granted, there were a few robots in the early Friday matches that did not move at all, but that is the fault of the team and has nothing to do with inspection, as they were allowed onto the field.

As for the scoring and gameplay, I think it is perfect. At the beginning of the season, when we were trying to decide what approach to take with the design of our robot, I made the case that we'd be better off statistically to be a strong scoring bot. Just like in 2006, there are to main ways to score points -- a more difficult method that allows for a greater potential of points, and an easier method that doesn't provide as much of a reward. I knew that the optimal alliance this year would be two scoring bots and one ramp/lifter, but I was sure that more than one third of all robots at the competition would be ramps (sure enough, that was the case), and that we'd have a better chance for getting picked if we could hang ringers, and hang them well.

For the quarterfinals at Peachtree, when we had more of a chance to coordinate with our alliance partners (1746 and 1057, you rock), we thought of an offensive strategy that was partly defensive. 1746 and us both could pick up ringers quickly and easily, so we hung our first ringers not on our side, but theirs. This helped not only to hinder them from hanging, but also from blocking us from making a long row. After we hung up around to the sides, they then would have to get in between the rack and the wall to get to our side, and it was much easier to block them.

I do think, however, that the GDC thought that matches would generally have scores in the 100+ plus range, so that the ramp bonuses could be a deciding factor, but not the extent it has shown to be. Conversely, I think that teams generally underestimated how difficult it would be to hang when getting pushed around and such.

Either way, I think this year had the most exciting game yet (but I've only been around since 2004), mostly because of the end-of-match developments that decide the results. Whether it's hanging just that one last ringer to double your points or getting both robots off the ground, nothing's more exhilirating than squeezing out a win with just seconds left.


P.S. - Another clever strategy I noticed was trying to throw ringers onto opponents robots when they were over on your side of the field, to cause them to get a penalty if they tried to pick another tube up. Ringers only got stuck on a robot like that once or twice, but it definitely helped.