Lunacy Review

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Wayne C.

Very few teams got a winning advantage from having a good auto mode (and yes- I did see a few that scored points in auto)

Except two of the 6 teams in the finals. Part of what made Wildstang and Thunderchickens so great was that they could start the match with potentially 40 points ready to dump.

I need to write this down for future seasons. When there appears to be something stupid wrong with a game (HPs outscoring robots, unreliable loading, autonomous that accomplishes nothing) I shouldn't complain about it. I should see it as a challenge to exploit! Building a robot that aims to outscore humans, or coming up with an ingenious autoload system in autonomous, these are clever little exploitations of the restrictions. Very helpful ones at that.

[MrForbes]

It sounds to me like Chris gets it

[Adam Freeman]

It was not just Thunderchickens and Wildstang that used auton to their advantage.

HOT and Truck Town also would prefer to load up our robots in auton. Even 971 was attempting to get to the human player station to get additional balls.

The placement of the robots on the field at the start was not by accident. Our alliance knew that 217 and 68 would be very dangerous if they both started with 20 balls, then trapped 971 in the middle of the field for a 40 ball dump into their trailer (ala the Einstien SF2).

Although both 67 and 111 would prefer to load in auton, I was confident that we could get balls off the floor quickly and disrupt 68 and 217 if we both attempted to block them from loading. Worst case in my mind was that we all loaded in auton, then it would come down to who could pin and dump better.

In F1 67 stopped 68, but 217 avoided 111 and both loaded in auton. In F2 67 kinda stopped 68 and loaded, while both 217 and 111 loaded.

We had many auton modes (12) that could be run anytime, but we never had to use them b/c very few teams tried to stop us from loading +6 balls into our robot before the clock started.

I think it gave us a strategic advatage and pushed our scoring average from ~17 balls/match to +23 balls/match.

I was surprised by how many teams only tried to avoid getting scored on in auton, even at the championships.