Call me crazy, but there's a hidden op strategy

[Brandon_L]

6 CIM colson with cut treads says otherwise.

I think you can defend all you want and possibly slow down teams and stop them from putting up 1 or 2 more gears then they would have, but at the end of the day scoring is what wins. I'd think about if stopping those 1 or 2 more gears is worth devoting the time when you yourself could be scoring. Especially when stopping those gears could, in the end, not even matter as you need 6 gears for the last rotor. If you defend for 2 or so gears and they wouldn't have put up all 6 anyway, you just wasted your whole match doing nothing.

The real opponent of this game, like most cycling games, is time. You'll see defense through districts and regionals but I believe it will fade away at higher levels.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Kevin Thorp

6 CIMS? Wow. The stall current is 133 amps per motor, or 800 amps total. How do you keep from tripping the circuit breaker?

Easy. Don't stall the CIMs. There will be some code protection, but otherwise it will be driver training.

Teams who think it will be easy to push/etc a bot that is placing a gear have another thing coming. If you come to defend us on one side lift, we'll make you chase us to the other side lift, behind 2 airlift ships that 100% obscure driver vision of what's going on with your robot. You'll likely get caught/jammed up on the walls that separate the lifts.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like that fact - I have no idea why the GDC is obsessed with obscuring the driver's vision of the field in recent years. Yet teams are better off watching the field tour videos of the driver's station before they decide what defense they play. There are plenty of other spots on the field for good defense .

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Don't get me wrong, I don't like that fact - I have no idea why the GDC is obsessed with obscuring the driver's vision of the field in recent years.

My guess is to push vision. They really seem to want vision to be used, and thats one easy way to do it.

it would be nice if we got a little more bandwidth though...

[Nyxyxylyth]

Originally Posted by MikLast

My guess is to push vision. They really seem to want vision to be used, and thats one easy way to do it.

it would be nice if we got a little more bandwidth though...

But you're not going to use vision to drive behind the airship up to a heavily defended loading area. It just makes everyone peer through laggy webcams

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by Nyxyxylyth

But you're not going to use vision to drive behind the airship up to a heavily defended loading area. It just makes everyone peer through laggy webcams

The past two years we did vision our camera hasn't been that laggy. I dont know the code (only saw the driver station at competition being the HP) but ours was fairly good at keeping itself in realtime.

[GeeTwo]

I didn't realize this was a hidden strategy. With the loading station and the lift at opposite ends of the field and a limit of one gear carried meaning that you want to make about a dozen trips, disrupting that supply chain was obvious to many of our team members.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

I didn't realize this was a hidden strategy. With the loading station and the lift at opposite ends of the field and a limit of one gear carried meaning that you want to make about a dozen trips, disrupting that supply chain was obvious to many of our team members.

Meh. It is obvious to me how to make your disruptions irrelevant and/or risky to execute. It's a lot of the same on-field strategies employed in 2007 & 2013.

[g_sawchuk]

Hidden?
11:25AM today:

Originally Posted by g_sawchuk

While the dividers may make gear defense a bit harder (similar to STRONGHOLD batter shot defense, the robot could just go one way, force you close to the divider, bolt the other way, and you'd take too long to get out).
Gears appear to take some precision to be scored, so a robot should be able to easily hinder your scoring ability in the area - and that's slowing down some massive points.

Defense is most definitely viable for STEAMWORKS, but it can be done with most designs, and I don't think many individuals have thrown defense (specifically at the gear scoring area) out the window as a viable match strategy.

[Chak]

Originally Posted by 2846 driver

So why not create the ultimate gear robot and just crush everyone else

So... you're saying that if we build effective robots, we'll win? Wow! What a revelation!

[cloudroth6]

Originally Posted by 2846 driver

You are allowed to hit those robots putting on those gears as much as you want (unless you pin them for more than five seconds :/) You can push them away from that pin and keep them at bay. The only saving grace they may have is the side bars, which don't protect them that much.

.

where in the rules does it say that you can push a robot while it is trying to attach a gear to the spring

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by cloudroth6

where in the rules does it say that you can push a robot while it is trying to attach a gear to the spring

You don't need a rule telling you that you can do a thing, you need a rule telling you that you can't. If you have found a rule that says you can't hit someone when they're placing a gear, please let me know. I have not found such a rule.

[alexandercmonro]

There was a poll posted earlier, and it stated that most teams are designing towards being gear robots, which essentially makes your point moot.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by alexandercmonro

There was a poll posted earlier, and it stated that most teams are designing towards being gear robots, which essentially makes your point moot.

First rule of CD polls: Don't trust 'em.

Second rule of CD polls: You heard me. Don't trust 'em.

Do I need to include the third, fourth, and fifth rules of CD polls?


Joking aside, I would suspect that many teams are still making that decision, and suspect even more strongly that many teams aren't saying that that decision is or which way they're leaning. If the poll was up in Week 6 of build and was public so everybody could see who was voting which way, that would be another story.

[evanperryg]

Thankfully, some of the T-bone power will be mitigated by the shields next to the gear lifts. It's also important to consider how easy it is to get stuck in the lauchpad- there's some tight choke points over there. If you get backed into their key, you're picking up fouls.

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

6 CIM tank drives are perhaps the most common drive in FIRST.

I would bet 4 CIM is far more common, the kit chassis transmission has been designed for it since like 2005.

Originally Posted by Kevin Thorp

6 CIMS? Wow. The stall current is 133 amps per motor, or 800 amps total. How do you keep from tripping the circuit breaker?

Don't Stall, a single CIM will trip a breaker at stall. Putting multiple motors in parallel should move you to a better part of the current curve, at the same torque, two motors in parallel should draw less current than a single motor.

Originally Posted by 2846 driver

Think about it though. Gears have a huge value to them. They make you think that shooting would be a waste of your time, practically. So why not create the ultimate gear robot and just crush everyone else and get those sweet RP?

I think that this will be the most broken strategy, but most of my team doesn't, but we'll see at the regional competition.

A good piece of advice, is to design you drive train so it can play great defense, but build towards a different strategy. You are much more likely to be picked for the finals as a decent gear bot that has a great drive train, than being a purpose built defense bot.