Just curious…
What are some of the best or strangest defensive techniques that have been seen this year?
-knocking over all of the ringers in opponent’s homezone to prevent ramp deployment
-parking two bots in homezone to prevent ramp climb (or maybe the radios died. Vegas qf #4 vs #5??? what happened here???
)
bodyguard: instead of the usual 2 offense/1defense, let your defense bot play bodyguard on your leading scorer to keep the other team’s defense bot away.
-Breaking the field to force a match reset.
(Yes it happened, but I’m sure not intentionally.)
We had a team playing against us in the elims at Waterloo that deployed their ramp immediately at the start of the match. Our strategy - drive across the field in autonomous and then get underneath their ramp before they deployed. Didn’t do a whole lot, but it caused enough confusion to throw the other alliance off…
Yea that was our partner 2076 in Waterloo, their drive didn’t work so they just deployed their huge ramps at the beginning of the match. I believe you guys got under one side of their ramps b4 they deployed them, I don’t know how much it threw us off (we didn’t really expect them to move :p), but you guys sure gave us a tough time on D.
There was one time our drive went ahead and pushed a deployed rampbot out of the homezone. It caused the rampbot to get a 20 point penalty and won us the match.
One idea I thought of, but I haven’t seen done intentionally would be to pick up a tube and drop it onto of a deployed ramp bot to keep people from climbing up.
Another idea would be to park in front of a deployed rampbot and simply keep their allies from driving up. Sometimes it might be better to take the penalty if it means keeping your opponent from scoring 60 points.
the penalty is 10 points / bot / 5seconds, during the 15 second endgame. so if the reliable ramp has one-sided access, this might actually make sense assuming that you are leading. otherwise, just go for ringers. 2 bots in the homezone for 15 seconds will negate 2 robots at 12".
Our human player threw a couple spoilers over the rack into the opponents HZ to try and mess with ramp deploys.
It appeared to be a Field Malfunction - Radios went out on both of those bots. As you saw, the fog horn was not blown. 
That was not intentional. If our alliance had not been penalized for those two bots that were waiting to hear from an operator, we almost certainly would have won the match and gone on to play a 3rd QF match to decide which alliance would have advanced.
Blake
The best strategy that our team came up with is for ramp/lift bots like ours. We like to call it offensive Defense. There are times when your alliance is up against killer ring placers…ones that can get a ringer under heavy defense and all! Instead of trying to race around the rack trying to beat them (which you can’t do) cap the ends of the rack. In SD most commonly the center spider was what was fought over and so try and place ringers on the center level on opposite sides so that the max row horizontally a team can get is 3 or 4 which makes it so that a 60 point lift wins the match every time! Good Luck
-Martin
Team 1717 D’Penguineers
Erm, you can’t do that. The Q&A covered that one even before regionals started. A team can’t be forced into a penalty by an opposing team. So while what’s done is done, don’t expect that to work in Atlanta. Especially against teams that know the rules.
ahaha the field reset. I remember I think it was SD, team 294 had their arm working and this one time they just drove by the siderail of the field and they turned the robot around and knocked over the radio tower. the refs paused the game for a few min until the fixed that and then they just said “go” casually and everyone continued driving again…
i think the best technique is to make the other alliance think they’re keeping u from a lift by keeping u on their side when you’re actually keeping them from lifting.
-Knocking down the tubes on the wall as human element tosses spoilers to the other side to make no room for ramp deployment within home zone(Team 2250 and our human element at Colorado Regional)
-defensive bot playing defense on the opposing defense bot(1583 during final match at Colorado Regional)
-bots who played offense all Friday went on defense on Saturday, completely messed up the other alliance strategy because the last three of our matches, our opposing alliances’ strategy was defend against 1636, well we didn’t play offense, we went on defense, confused them enough to tie the last three matches.(Us at Colorado Regional)
By FAR:
- Placing tubes on opponents ramps. It renders many ramps useless or takes too much time to take off the ramp. We thought it didnt count in Boston (read the Q&A thinking that it meant if the RAMP were resting on a tube… not a robot on a tube on the ramp)
And in the same match in Boston:
- Without “Grabbing”, a team slid part of their gripper under the ramp and tried to flip the ramp up, knowing the other team only had one chance to deploy it.
that was a fun match. I was so surprised they just let us keep going.
i think the best technique is to make the other alliance think they’re keeping u from a lift by keeping u on their side when you’re actually keeping them from lifting.
Hey hey hey… you don’t have to keep rubbing it in :rolleyes: .
It was a brilliant strategy though, especially us keeping beachbots from getting back in the 1st match cemented our win… It was natural to think I was doing it again… Well, its true what they say about strategy I guess.
In the same link they also state that if the blue team does not return to the home zone they will be given the appropriate penalty. They(our drive team) weren’t even thinking about the penalty at the time I don’t think, they just wanted to make it so the other team couldn’t get up the ramps. The penalty was just sort of a side effect.
Edit: Now that I think about it I don’t recall if they actually received a penalty or if it was simply the other team not getting up the ramp that won it for us.
this year in the quarter finals at st louis we were up against a ramp bot that started oriented so that there partners had to enter from outside the end zone so i basically just went and parked the robot at the end of that ramp and sat there they didn’t score we won.
I drove for my team at UC Davis,
We did “body Guard”
and teams tried to knock over rings in our home zone, but we cleared them, that has never worked, also teams tried to park against our side to stop our ramp from deploying, also that did not work, we deployed and one side fell down, that side got lifted, when they moved the other side fell down and we lifted that side also.
I’ve also seen teams just get in front of the rack on the opponents side and block teams from scoring, although I don’t know how effective that was.
I am personally a fan of trying to shake the rack enough so the other alliance can’t score. Doing this in autonomous mode is even better.
That happened in Las Vegas, interestingly enough, it was a pretty good autonomous round for our alliance.