[FTC]: How's it going?

[JohnFogarty]

The FTC fourum is getting sleepy how are the competitions going??

[JesseK]

We finally had some 200-pt+ games yesterday, and would have had a 400-pointer in the finals had the bots not been so stuffed full of balls that they couldn't shoot many at all.

All in all, autonomous has been tricky to get consistent for us. We had an 8-ball autonomous and could have had more had the flipper not missed the chute by 1/4" ><. Yet 2 matches previous the thing went off on a tangent, turned way too far, and shot 15+ balls at the referee... The students are working very hard on it though.

It's definitely a fun game to coach. The choices you make for autonomous can put you in a very precarious state for teleop. On the flipside, autonomous can keep your opponents on edge for the whole match since they'll have no clue whether you're going outer goal or upper goal.

[Abra Cadabra IV]

High score at San Diego yesterday was 322 points, second highest was 256 (and would've been higher had the match not ended a second before we could shoot the bonus ball). Both of these happened during eliminations, and not by the same alliance.

At both the regionals I've been to, the majority of teams have focused on scoring in the far goal and neglected the high goal. The teams that can score in the high goal have had a significant advantage, especially the ones that can empty their robot into the high goal and still pick up plenty of balls to score in the end game. Is this true anywhere else?

(Also, the importance of the end-game seems to have pretty much ended the practice of scoring on yourself for ranking points in all but the most unbalanced matches. Even then, it's risky... as some teams have found out the hard way. )

[JohnFogarty]

I have to say FTC is a win this year, at our regional the high goal was neglected as well we have a 6 ball/3sec firing ratio so we just loaded it up and did as you said went got some more and fired the end game.

We had a high score of 155 i beileve but remember that was week 1.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Abra Cadabra IV

At both the regionals I've been to, the majority of teams have focused on scoring in the far goal and neglected the high goal. The teams that can score in the high goal have had a significant advantage, especially the ones that can empty their robot into the high goal and still pick up plenty of balls to score in the end game. Is this true anywhere else?

Without divulging too much strategy, I will say is that you can completely surprise your opponents if you skip the outer goal in the end game and try to hit the bonus ball in the upper goal after a very successful autonomous. So yes, high goal is still a formidable strategy. The game we did it was still ~150 pts or so, and combined with other maneuvers and the advantageous positioning it gave us, I'm sure we could have kept the other alliance's score below that.