Aerial Assist Was Lit

FIRST General Forum
#1

Thanks Kevin Leonard for the idea for this thread.

Robot Ball (AA) was my favorite game ever, and with some tweaking was potentially the perfect robot sport. I believe this unrelated to my team’s performance in that game (we lost in the QFs). What I think would have made it better, if memory serves:

[ul]
[li]Scoring tasks performed by a dedicated individual rather than a referee, and using something other than the touchpad technology that was featured[/li][li]The pedestal could have worked[/li][li]Teams could have been given a bit more warning that the open field would destroy their robots. Though I agree with those of you who think it’s always up to teams to properly evaluate and prepare for the game as it is, so don’t jump on me about this[/li][li]I think that’s it[/li][/ul]

At least from my perspective. Why does this matter now? Well, everyone speculates about 2018. And we’ve seen so many game ideas recycled in some form or another. 2014 was kind of 2008 recycled. So, next time it comes around, what would you like the GDC to consider?

Please, GDC, bring back Robot Ball! It was so much it’s own thing, rather than a knockoff of some human sport. It was so much a FIRST thing, requiring interaction with human players and autonomous routines and cooperation. I am pining for it…

#2

I would do anything to play Aerial Assist again. The versatility of the game and the strategy involved was unparalleled in a way that mirrored even modern sports in a unique way beyond the limits of your run of the mill FRC game. Especially with the team interaction through assists, the coordinated defense, the amount of driver skill involved… (except for the 50pt fouls :yikes: )

If the community could do something like Madtown Throwback again that would be amazing…

#3

Please tell me he didn’t bring up Death Cycles again…

#4

You appear to have missed the other part of the title, but I won’t worry about that too much.

I agree with your assessment of AA. It was it’s own sport with it’s own mechanics that really didn’t have to borrow from anywhere else.

For a while, I thought Ultimate Ascent was my favorite game, but with hindsight and nostalgia, I definitely think it was Aerial Assist.

I’m not sure how the GDC could do something that dope again, though. Playing the same game again wouldn’t really work, because we’ve all seen the solutions, but if you could somehow take that feeling of a fast-paced full-contact game with different evolving facets are turn it into a new game, that would be the desired outcome here.

EDIT:

Even without considering death cycles- AA was dope.
(Although imagine if the game had progressed further to a stage where there was counterplay between alliances scoring death cycles and alliances doing consistent catching think about how sick that would be okay I’m done now)

#5

AA was not lit! The game converged on an optimal strategy too fast and it just became a relay race of who could execute the strategy faster!

#6

And neither was the pedestal!!!

#7

http://i.imgur.com/0mKXcg1.gif

EDIT: Will state that I really enjoyed AA and that the strategies at play were deeper than has been suggested as evidenced by the fact that you didn’t see nearly enough robots doing what we were doing back in 2014. That robot deserved a lot better than it got in the end. Any field other than Archimedes that year and it would have been a first pick.

#8

Again, do you want to start a rant about death cycles? 'Cause that’s how to start one.

#9

I disagree. At every level, the game had smart defense and there were opportunity costs to every action, from scoring high goals to trussing the ball at the right time.

At higher levels, strategies evolved with new ideas like human player passbacks and even shooting the ball to your human player, as well as finishing with the “death finish” of tossing the ball into your robot which is already in the corner ready to shoot. Deciding whether to give the ball to your inbounder, then your trusser or vice-versa determined much of where the action on the field was taking place, and even later developments had teams actually using their goalie sticks in autonomous, creating one of the greatest Einstein finals of all time.

#10

I’ve been baited :slight_smile: AA was my first, and therefore favourite game. I’ve heard strong arguments for other games from people who started with them. There are also a million threads on what was and what makes the best game, so take this opinion with a grain of salt:

AA had some important aspects that worked, only some of which have been repeated since:

  • A meaningful way that low-resource teams could contribute, and in fact were required to win
  • Great visuals, with big gamepieces, and clear goals
  • One gamepiece, so the audience knew where to look, and where to find the drama
  • No end game, so the flow of the game wasn’t interrupted for another tacked-on game

AA wasn’t perfect. It had its flaws:

  • The foul and possession rules were way too hard on the refs.
  • The two on one defense was exciting, but hard on robots (although I think I’d still be OK with it).
  • The charades auto interaction was silly, even if it did open up a bit of interesting strategy
  • The strong relationship between ranking and schedule luck if you had really dead robots in the tournament (similar to 2017).
  • The punishing fouls for human players straying from their small box (also similar to 2017).
  • The lack of a theme (opinions vary).

Your suggested fixes resolve some of the issues, but not all. I’d love to hear from teams that attended the MadTown Throwdown in 2015, when they chose to replay Aerial Assist instead of Recycle Rush. Did it still have the same magic, or did it not age well?

#11

Of all the games I’ve had the pleasure to either spectate or play, Aerial Assist was by far my favorite. It forced teams to directly work together in order to score points, and I loved the open field. It was fast paced, exciting, and extremely spectator-friendly. I could easily explain Aerial Assist to anyone who might have asked, and I can definitely not say the same for the past 2 seasons at least (Recycle Rush wasn’t too difficult to explain). The last 3 games have been fun still, (some more fun than others :rolleyes: ) but Aerial Assist was easily better than all of them, IMO.

#12

AA in my opinion had the best high-level matches of any year. At lower levels though, the ruleset and really bad robots dragged it down a fair amount.

AA would likely have been my favorite game if:
The field had always worked properly (if there ever was a year for a fully operational field, this was definitely it).
Penalty points had scaled with the number of assists on the opponent’s ball or something instead of being the ridiculous 50 points in trivial scenarios.
Possession rules had been defined differently for your own ball and for the opponent’s ball. The definition of possession was clearly not suited to handle both offensive and defensive possession, so they should have been differentiated.

#13

It was a neat game.

Too bad I’m not into games…I’m into building robots. And of the 12 years I’ve been involved with FRC, that was the boringest robot build of them all. By far.

But I guess we each get different things out of this big adventure that is Robotics.

#14

2015: Pick up totes in a stack, cap with recycle bin, shove pool noodle into bin opening, place on scoring platform, repeat
2016: Carry boulder from midfield, drive over defense (or lift Portculis during regular season, let’s be real here nobody bothered with the Sally Port or Drawbridge, especially not in elims, and all the other defenses you could drive over/under with a solid drive train), shoot boulder, repeat, drive onto batter.
2017: Traverse field to collect gears, go back to airship and place gear on peg to score. Scale rope at the end of the match. Optionally, shoot fuel in the time in between.

I mean, every FRC game has an optimal strategy. To score, and score quicker than your opponent. 2014, take this big ball and score it down on the other side of the field. HOWEVER, in 2014 you can potentially INCREASE the score of that ball when you put it in the goal by passing it off between partners on the way down there, but it was never required that you do that, you can score the ball without passing it off and it would still get points. But there was only one ball, so all three robots couldn’t go up and down the field scoring those balls by themselves the whole match. That’s where 2014 is a more strategic game, you had to actually stop and think “Is it worth it to truss on all of our cycles?” “These guys don’t have a very solid intake/outtake, do we want them to help us get assist points, or do we put them on defense?” There was a lot more play that year vs all the others where it’s “Ok I’m gonna shoot frisbees and pick them up off the floor, you go grab frisbees from the feeder station and then at the end of the match we all climb”

#15

AA was also by far my favorite game. It perfectly combined fierce cooperation and conflict on the field in a way that made every match gripping. Compared to 2013, which had robots interacting with each other a lot less than 2012, and 2015, which played more like an exhibition than a game, 2014 just had so much more intensity. The amount of inter-robot play from that year also had a lasting effect; at least from what I observed, teams in my region took match strategy (and strategy in general) a lot more seriously after 2014. Not to mention, the floor for being competitive in that game was super low, but the ceiling for most roles was high. This made the game extremely welcoming to teams with a wide variety of resource levels.

#16
#17

>2003 as the baseline for worst game

They had no idea…

#18

Hey, Recycle Rush wasn’t that bad. It was a great engineering challenge.

#19

Jared’s bringing up a really interesting point - the Chief Delphi reaction certainly was much more negative about Aerial Assist than this thread seems to indicate. Certainly CD much preferred a game like Stronghold to Aerial Assist, at least at the time. To me, there seem to be two (non mutually exclusive) possible explanations for that.

  1. CD is hypercritical, especially in season.
  2. Aerial Assist is benefitting from nostalgia

Are there more explanations I haven’t thought of? Which one of these seems the most likely - if not as the whole reason, perhaps as the predominant reason?

Personally, I always loved AA, but have pretty much chalked it up to it being my first game. While we’re at it I also enjoyed Recycle Rush, so make your own decisions about how tasteful I am when it comes to FRC games.

#20

I remember this, and I remember being frustrated by the game and it’s mechanics as well. But once the frustrating fouls got largely ironed out of that game, it was pretty incredible.

I’ll amend my original statement:
“Aerial Assist was Lit beginning in like week 3 of that season”

One thing I’ve thought about in a lot of games is that there should be a “replay that match because it was not what this program is about” rule you can invoke to replay terrible matches in any game where robots are dead or red cards are thrown that only gets invoked if both alliances in the elimination rounds agree to it.

For example- Semis 1-3 at Long Island this past weekend saw the #5 alliance get a stupid red card for having their pilot’s hand come out of the airship for the second time during those elimination rounds. They lost that match despite hitting 4 rotors and their opponents not coming close. That’s the kind of match I’d want replayed no matter which alliance I was on. Similarly, in F-3, 527 momentarily went dead and got pushed into the red retrieval zone and accrued a ton of fouls- that should just get replayed if both alliances agree. Now I wouldn’t want the situation where the winning alliance feels pressured into agreeing to a replay or something like that, but it just seems unreasonable sometimes to lose that way.

(this matters in this discussion because 2014’s main flaw was the egregious fouls and full-contact game that caused many robots to get damaged- but mostly because I’ve been thinking of this for a while and think it makes sense- although just for the eliminations)