Staying in Zones

[Jon Stratis]

One thing we've been working on is modeling matches with robots of different strengths. A few examples to give you ideas:

- If a robot breaks down in a zone, how does that affect the ball distribution (and the score)?

- If a robot is horribly overmatched by the opponent in their zone, how does that affect the ball distribution?

- How does the human player ball return rate affect the distribution?

One thing to keep in mind from what we know about sports... uneven pairings are horribly ineffectual. Think about football - if the receiver is significantly faster/more agile than the defender, he can get open for a pass a lot more often. Or soccer - if the defender is a lot slower than the attacker, he won't be able to keep up. Or Basketball... the parallels are there.

Also consider strategy. If your middle player is horribly outmatched or breaks down, what do you do? Does your scorer come back to help? If so, what does the opposition defender do - follow the scorer or stay put and just kick back any balls the scorer sends over into that zone? Does your defender push forward to help, and sacrifice any points for balls that are already in the zone, but potentially stop more balls from getting into score-able position?

Having a good modeling system and a good way of determining all the robots abilities is going to be extremely important in determining strategy this year - much more so than years past, when robots would typically engage with any/all of their opposition at different points in the match.