I have been searching through the rules to see if there is a rule that says you cant place boulders in the outerworks… but haven’t found any. I know this isn’t a violation of G40 because this rule specifically states going from the neutral zone to the courtyard. and neither the boulder or the robot would be entering the courtyard. has anyone found a (potential) rule against this?
No, but I don’t understand the benefit.
Do you want to explain the reasoning?
if you have a good shooter in the courtyard and you can give that robot boulders quickly, you would want to get the boulders there as fast as possible. the fastest way would be too get the boulder somewhere that the shooting robot can get it, while not having to cross the defenses. you cant shoot over or through the defenses. and going through them takes a bunch of time. of you could place a boulder on a defense like the moat, it would be easily accessible to place and receive…
You can’t feed boulders to a shooter bot. You have to completely cross their defense with contact with “your” boulder or you will receive a foul.
G39 ROBOTS are prohibited from launching BOULDERS unless they are in contact with the opponent’s TOWER or carpet in the opponent’s COURTYARD, and not in contact with any other carpet.
G40 A ROBOT may not cause a BOULDER to move from the NEUTRAL ZONE into the opponent’s COURTYARD unless:
A. the ROBOT contacts the BOULDER within OUTER WORKS, and
B. the ROBOT completes its CROSSING (i.e. doesn’t completely back out of the OUTER WORKS into the NEUTRAL ZONE)
I’m not positive this would be a legal strategy.
The wording of the rule is that no robot can cause a boulder to cross from the neutral zone to the courtyard without crossing. Since the ball would cross from the neutral zone to the courtyard through the atoms of two robots, neither of which CROSSED, this would almost certainly incur some sort of foul.
It’s definitely a good question for the Q&A if no one has already asked it.
The fastest way to feed a dedicated high shooter bot I can think of , would be from HP bowling to Limbo bot to intake and cross Low Bar to Courtyard then drop off and rinse repeat
Or alternatively… Use Midline boulders to cross and drop.
Not sure if it saves that much time though having to transfer boulders between teams then shoot. As we should all know relying on other bots can be problematic.
Quality high goal shooters will tend to be high bots with high CoG, making them unstable when crossing defenses. The best way to optimize your alliance’s strategy would be to have an assisting robot (<15" height) ferry balls from the Secret Passage to the opponent’s courtyard, almost entirely mitigating the need for the high goal shooter to move. However, it would be wise to bring the balls at the same pace that the HGS (High Goal Shooter) fires, so that the opposing defensive robot is unable to simply drive in between the HGS and the balls.
I disagree with most of this.
Effective shooters will be of all heights, and should be able to cross some defense effectively.
There are certainly strategies where feeding your shooter makes sense, but I don’t know that crossing through the low bar is the “best” way to feed balls to your partner, nor is it safe to assume your partner won’t be able to cross under the low bar themselves.
Just be careful with making sweeping assumptions about the capabilities of all other robots.