Best/Strangest Defense Techniques

[Stephi Rae]

Just curious...

What are some of the best or strangest defensive techniques that have been seen this year?

[danshaffer]

-knocking over all of the ringers in opponent's homezone to prevent ramp deployment
-parking two bots in homezone to prevent ramp climb (or maybe the radios died. Vegas qf #4 vs #5???? what happened here???? )

bodyguard: instead of the usual 2 offense/1defense, let your defense bot play bodyguard on your leading scorer to keep the other team's defense bot away.

[Chris Marra]

-Breaking the field to force a match reset.

(Yes it happened, but I'm sure not intentionally.)

[Jeff Waegelin]

We had a team playing against us in the elims at Waterloo that deployed their ramp immediately at the start of the match. Our strategy - drive across the field in autonomous and then get underneath their ramp before they deployed. Didn't do a whole lot, but it caused enough confusion to throw the other alliance off...

[Jonathan Norris]

Originally Posted by Jeff Waegelin

We had a team playing against us in the elims at Waterloo that deployed their ramp immediately at the start of the match. Our strategy - drive across the field in autonomous and then get underneath their ramp before they deployed. Didn't do a whole lot, but it caused enough confusion to throw the other alliance off...

Yea that was our partner 2076 in Waterloo, their drive didn't work so they just deployed their huge ramps at the beginning of the match. I believe you guys got under one side of their ramps b4 they deployed them, I don't know how much it threw us off (we didn't really expect them to move ), but you guys sure gave us a tough time on D.

[Herodotus]

There was one time our drive went ahead and pushed a deployed rampbot out of the homezone. It caused the rampbot to get a 20 point penalty and won us the match.

One idea I thought of, but I haven't seen done intentionally would be to pick up a tube and drop it onto of a deployed ramp bot to keep people from climbing up.
Another idea would be to park in front of a deployed rampbot and simply keep their allies from driving up. Sometimes it might be better to take the penalty if it means keeping your opponent from scoring 60 points.

[danshaffer]

Originally Posted by Herodotus

Another idea would be to park in front of a deployed rampbot and simply keep their allies from driving up. Sometimes it might be better to take the penalty if it means keeping your opponent from scoring 60 points.

the penalty is 10 points / bot / 5seconds, during the 15 second endgame. so if the reliable ramp has one-sided access, this might actually make sense assuming that you are leading. otherwise, just go for ringers. 2 bots in the homezone for 15 seconds will negate 2 robots at 12".

[Vikesrock]

Our human player threw a couple spoilers over the rack into the opponents HZ to try and mess with ramp deploys.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Herodotus

There was one time our drive went ahead and pushed a deployed rampbot out of the homezone. It caused the rampbot to get a 20 point penalty and won us the match.

One idea I thought of, but I haven't seen done intentionally would be to pick up a tube and drop it onto of a deployed ramp bot to keep people from climbing up.
Another idea would be to park in front of a deployed rampbot and simply keep their allies from driving up. Sometimes it might be better to take the penalty if it means keeping your opponent from scoring 60 points.

Erm, you can't do that. The Q&A covered that one even before regionals started. A team can't be forced into a penalty by an opposing team. So while what's done is done, don't expect that to work in Atlanta. Especially against teams that know the rules.

[LightWaves1636]

-Knocking down the tubes on the wall as human element tosses spoilers to the other side to make no room for ramp deployment within home zone(Team 2250 and our human element at Colorado Regional)
-defensive bot playing defense on the opposing defense bot(1583 during final match at Colorado Regional)
-bots who played offense all Friday went on defense on Saturday, completely messed up the other alliance strategy because the last three of our matches, our opposing alliances' strategy was defend against 1636, well we didn't play offense, we went on defense, confused them enough to tie the last three matches.(Us at Colorado Regional)

[Kims Robot]

By FAR:
- Placing tubes on opponents ramps. It renders many ramps useless or takes too much time to take off the ramp. We thought it didnt count in Boston (read the Q&A thinking that it meant if the RAMP were resting on a tube... not a robot on a tube on the ramp)

And in the same match in Boston:
- Without "Grabbing", a team slid part of their gripper under the ramp and tried to flip the ramp up, knowing the other team only had one chance to deploy it.

[Spider-Man]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

By FAR:
- Placing tubes on opponents ramps. It renders many ramps useless or takes too much time to take off the ramp. We thought it didnt count in Boston (read the Q&A thinking that it meant if the RAMP were resting on a tube... not a robot on a tube on the ramp)

And in the same match in Boston:
- Without "Grabbing", a team slid part of their gripper under the ramp and tried to flip the ramp up, knowing the other team only had one chance to deploy it.

As far as the non-"grabbing" of the Queen's ramp in that match, I still believe that intentional entanglement should have been called. If not that, then at least intentional outside the bumper zone contact. The arm in question was put underneath the ramp and attempted to lift/push the ramp. I did not like the call on this; however, I think it really didn't play much into the results of the match, just wasting the time of the offending robot.


As far as interesting strategy, some on our team though of pushing any early deploying one-sided ramps ramp-first to the end of the home zone. If the ramp and platforms are on the sides of the robot and there is no swerve/holonomic/meccanum drive, the robot cannot reposition without either raising the lift mechanism or risking 72" penalties.

[lancerbotics]

Originally Posted by LightWaves1636

-Knocking down the tubes on the wall as human element tosses spoilers to the other side to make no room for ramp deployment within home zone(Team 2250 and our human element at Colorado Regional)
-defensive bot playing defense on the opposing defense bot(1583 during final match at Colorado Regional)
-bots who played offense all Friday went on defense on Saturday, completely messed up the other alliance strategy because the last three of our matches, our opposing alliances' strategy was defend against 1636, well we didn't play offense, we went on defense, confused them enough to tie the last three matches.(Us at Colorado Regional)

This was the purpose of our robot, to be a small qnd fast robot that could play defense and harrass the opposition and then speed home and climb or be lifted for 30 pts. If you saw "Mini-me" in action you would be impressed.

[Herodotus]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Erm, you can't do that. The Q&A covered that one even before regionals started. A team can't be forced into a penalty by an opposing team. So while what's done is done, don't expect that to work in Atlanta. Especially against teams that know the rules.

In the same link they also state that if the blue team does not return to the home zone they will be given the appropriate penalty. They(our drive team) weren't even thinking about the penalty at the time I don't think, they just wanted to make it so the other team couldn't get up the ramps. The penalty was just sort of a side effect.

Edit: Now that I think about it I don't recall if they actually received a penalty or if it was simply the other team not getting up the ramp that won it for us.

[Aren_Hill]

this year in the quarter finals at st louis we were up against a ramp bot that started oriented so that there partners had to enter from outside the end zone so i basically just went and parked the robot at the end of that ramp and sat there they didn't score we won.