Prediction: Veterans take off the gloves in Week 3

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Cory

I think you're misreading what I said.

If you're on an alliance that has two robots that can score well, but has no ramps, or ramps that don't work very well, you will almost always lose to an alliance that has one solid scoring robot, good defenders, and a good ramp bot.

It doesn't matter how good the tube scoring bots are. Two robots bashing the heck out of both will be able to hold an alliance to less than 60 tube points. At which point it comes down to the ramps, in which case the first alliance loses.

I know what you were saying, but it does not always prove true. In New Jersey, 25, 103, and 1302 won by being the last teams at the rack. Once the other alliance had gone back to ramp up, they would score the last few ringers to push their alliance over the top of the 60 point threshold. On occasion 103 would ramp on 1302 as well, but it very rarely happened. 75 and 293 saw some similar results in some elimination matches at Chesapeake, but eventually teams stopped trying to ramp against them altogether, and played against them on the rack (with no better results however). 75 and 293 exposed something that hadn't been exploited heavily in most of the earlier week action (148 and 217 did it some during St. Louis). Most teams (at the regional level) aren't very good at scoring on the top spider. When 75 and 293 got together, they essentially monopolized the two fastest top spider scoring teams, and used it to dominate where most other alliance couldn't touch them. No alliance managed to get more than 1 or 2 tubes on the top against them, and they had a row of at least 5 every match (besides their first QF match, where they attempted to score middle instead of top).
Many people view this game too much in terms of one dimension. While the easiest and quickest way to overcome a "double-bonus" is a row of 6, it is not the only way. The next shortest configuration (a row of 5 and a row of 4 with 4 columns of 2 forming) does require 9 tubes though, but given the ~25-30 seconds of free scoring an alliance can get while the other alliance ramps, it is by no means out of the question.
Granted, I'd still rather have the option to ramp than not.