How Hard is FIRST Stronghold?

[Ginger Power]

Are we overestimating the difficulty of this game? I refuse to include a poll because it seems like every thread has a poll these days.

There has been much discussion about the low bar and how it will affect the way Stronghold will be played. This discussion led to many polls which yield interesting results. Some of these results indicate that about half the teams (on CD) are trying to do it all. Is doing it all really so hard?

First we need to define "doing it all". Here is the criteria as I see it (I'd love to hear some discussion on this as well):

• Shooting High
• Shooting Low
• Traversing all the defenses
• Climbing

The defenses break down into 2 categories, those that can be done with a drivetrain only, and those that require some kind of manipulation. It would be advantageous for every team to build a drivetrain capable of traversing every defense that depends on a drivetrain only. Every team probably came to the conclusion that the more capable their drivetrain is, the better off they will be. There is a COTS solution for these defenses (Rhino tracks) and there are many examples of what works and what doesn't (Ri3D).

Shooting high and low can be accomplished with one or two mechanisms and there are many examples out there for teams to learn from. It isn't a giant leap from building a capable drivetrain, to building a capable drivetrain with a scoring mechanism on it.

Climbing is hard. I'm not going to argue that one bit. Climbing while also doing low bar... that's very hard. So building a do-it-all robot is very hard by extension. However, that wasn't the initial question.

Where does a do-it-all team end up when they fail to climb, or they fail to do low bar, or both? They have a robot that can traverse most defenses and can score high and low. If they do those tasks at a high level, they can go very far. I don't believe it's terribly difficult to do those tasks at a competitive level given the resources that are available.

So how hard is FIRST Stronghold really?

Edit: I should probably clarify that I'm wondering how hard it is relative to previous games. I believe that FIRST in general is "The hardest fun you'll ever have."