I want to disagree. A significant portion of the engineering thought process is trying to figure out how to do something quicker, cheaper, lighter, stronger, … - there are not to many opportunities to create something from nothing.
This game gave you the opportunity to look back and see what worked in 2007, what did not work in 2007, and then try to make the ones that did work, work better. With the added challenge of trying to fit a mini-bot deployment system in, you also had to do it with less space and less weight. That’s what I see most engineers doing on a pretty regular basis.
John, I think this is more a dynamic strategy game than any before it. Things are more constant than they are dynamic, and there are fewer drill-down tasks than ever before. The key change is that during every part of the teleop period, there can be 1 available robot that can switch roles instantaneously to adjust to the opponents’ strategy regardless of what the current strategy is. I think elite bots that can do it all will REALLY shine here. That makes it fun; it also adds to the pressure on the coaches – pressure to look forward to, imo.
(assuming the bolts don’t fall off, the breakers don’t trip and the motors don’t catch on fire…)
The robots put up on CD look good but I’m more worried about the hundreds of teams who have said nothing and put nothing up at all. When I was at the Rochester Rally there were alot of teams not ready to compete and even more who did not show up. That’s a bad sign.
Definitely a very level game, and I think a lot of it has to do with its similarity to 2007. Many teams improved upon the 2007 versions of themselves, while intelligent younger teams looked to 2007 videos and information (behind the design) to develop a robot based on some knowledge.
The way I see it playing out is the early weeks will come down to minibots. Alliances which have 2 very quick and effective minibots will be VERY difficult to take down. As the weeks go on and teams emulate succesful minibots and also figure out how to make their deployments faster/more reliable, we will see a slight shift in focus to tube scoring.
The key difference for me between 2007 and now is not scoring tubes as quickly as you can (I mean it is, but it’s not just a grab and place fest). It’s ensuring each tube you score is in a position to score the maximum amount of points. We saw instances in the scrimmage (small sample size warning) where teams scored a significant amount more tubes than their opponents, but did it on a different row (ie: middle and bottom as opposed to top). The scores would be close, but teams who concentrated on the top row only and took the extra time to ensure the scores were solid, tended to come out on top.
I imagine week 1 will be similar in strategy to this. Quality tubes winning out over quantity of tubes, and minibots ruling all.
I don’t blame the super powerhouse teams for preferring a more difficult game like Breakaway - that was a really cool game that showed how organized and talented the really good teams are. But it’s nice to have a year where more teams can field a robot that can do each element of the game pretty well. I’m happy that the difficulty of the game can vary somewhat from year to year.
A possible unfortunate consequence of the access to such designs from 2007 is that many teams may see ideas from Behind the Design and try to implement similar designs when they may not have the same resources that some of these award winning teams had. It may result in many teams trying to go beyond their means of production and not having a working robot come competition. That being said, we will still see many more top tier robots this year do to the availability of these designs. It will be a contest to see who can build it faster, better, easier and who puts in the time to practice, compete, and scout the right way during the competition season.
I agree with this.
Like any other previous years, there are hundreds of teams who are not done yet at this point every season, and given the fact that minibots can be brought to the event, you have two robots to worry about instead of one. Our HI scrimmage and the fact that many teams didnt show up was a great indication of it in our own State, not that I was surprised.
Organized? Yes we are. Powerhouse? NO.
Even thought we had a great year last year, I would never ask to be in the same situation again as Breakaway was THE worst build season we ever had. That was a tough game to be able to do everything and “try” to do it well.
Personally, I like the game being similar to 2007. There are still other elements to this game that calls for great strategies, a great human player, great driving (backwards again to score), and TWO robots.
There are a lot of good looking robots on Chief Delphi… but people tend to forget what gets on chief Delphi are about 50 robots out of the top 300 teams or so. When you uncrate/unbag your robot at regional and have minor installations remaining (like our lift) or none at all; and you see teams scrambling to get something, moving or not, on the field, then you remember. The week one regionals can sometimes have 3-4 moving/present robots in a match, and only one or two of them can actually be a factor.
Good looking bots get online every year. Small samples will yield skewed results.
The tremendous lack of face time with the robot will hurt teams alot. If you don’t have time to practice driving and tube handling and have to learn on the fly then you are going to be WAY BEHIND the teams that have practice bots who get this game down to a science.
