Championchip Defence Tips

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey guys, my team just won the rookie allstar award at North Bay regional yesterday. We found out that our strongsuit was defence. Anyways saving the entire story, as the driver i dont want to be a laughing stock at worlds. Any tips on defence for a 2nd year driver with no way to practice on a bot? Any info would be greatly appreciated!

Robot info:
4 triwheel assemblies
Stock KOP 4 motor and gearbox arrangement
Triwheels make it so we csn only drive half speed (2:1 gearing)
We have 8 wheels on the ground at any point due to the wheels
Wheels are 6 inch andymark KOP

2

Here is a picture of our wheels. And for the record we did rebuild our intake to complete CDF and portcullis

3

It was great to see you at North Bay - we were sitting right behind you when you won rookie all star and we were super pumped for you!

Some tips:

  • I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that you were underweight - typically you want to be 119.9 pounds when playing defense, so that it’s harder for an offensive team to push you around. If you are indeed underweight, add weight evenly distributed along the outside edges as low as you can.
  • Learn where the opponents like to shoot from and don’t let them get there. This is a huge one - some scouting goes a long way.
  • Make sure you take some of your practice time at worlds to get good at getting on the batter quickly and without great sight lines - this will be a huge necessity for good alliances at worlds.
4

First off, congratulations! Many teams do not make it to World’s so quickly. I’m associated with a team that has won all of its blue banners playing defense and was the driver when I went through the program. One thing you should consider is not pigeonholing yourself. If you are on an alliance and your shooter breaks, you’ll have to change strategy. Try and use the time between now and World’s to make yourself more viable for more than one role. If you’re confident all you want to do is defense, make yourself a defense robot. It looks like you’re underweight and lowbar capable. Put something on your robot that makes you 120 pounds and make sure your center of gravity is in the center. Put something tall on you that brings you up to the height limit. You might want to focus more on your drive train. I’m not sure how well you can stand your ground with those wheels but you want to have as much pushing power as possible. Evaluate your wheels, gearboxes, and bumpers for their pushing/pinning power.

Defense this year is huge. My number one tip for you is to learn what causes penalties. Make sure you don’t get any penalties. If you prevent 2 high goals from being scored but cause a few penalties, you’ve hurt your alliance. The trick to not getting penalties is by making sure it’s clear you haven’t done anything wrong. If you’re getting away from pinning someone, make sure the referees know that you went six feet back. Don’t tote the line.

That being said, defense is really simple. Disrupt their cycles by getting in their way and stay out of your alliance partners’ way. Make sure you know how long five seconds is. After enough time, you’ll have a general feeling of when you should back off. Remember – your goal is to just get in their way and be annoying. The low goal this year is very easy to interfere with. You are allowed to ram them while they’re on the batter, so just do whatever you can to mess with their alignment. Ram the side of them to make them change angle.

My last tip is to think creatively and capitalize upon their mistakes. If they accidently spit out a ball or miss a goal, pick the ball up and put it in your secret passage!

5

You’re team earned its way to World’s, there’s absolutely no way to be a laughing stock.

As for the tips on defense: know the rules, you don’t want to commit dumb fouls that could easily be avoided. Don’t be intimidated, have confidence in your abilities as a driver. Good luck and have fun at World’s!

6

First off, congratulations on winning Rookie All-Star. That’s a great indication of your team’s potential to be exceptional in the coming years.

In regards to defense in St. Louis, a good idea might be to identify the main strategies used by the strongest teams in your division. Once divisions are released, you could pick out the top 10 or so strongest teams, and watch as many videos of them from previous competitions as you can.

Find out what they do, and when they normally do it. Do they breach right after auto? Do they start shooting immediately? Where do they shoot from? Where do they get boulders from? What paths do they normally take/through what defenses? Try to get a rough idea of how these teams like to play the game.

Then start formulating your own strategies on how to prevent them from doing what they do best. If you’re constantly disrupting strong teams from performing as best they can, they’ll take notice of that.

With any luck, they’ll realize they don’t want to have to play counter-defense against you in the playoffs, and move you up on their pick list. I know a lot of the time at our strategy meetings is spent discussing teams’ abilities to play defense, so definitely don’t let your ability to do so get overlooked.

And when it comes down to it, no one is gonna think you’re a laughing stock based on how well you play defense. Very few teams effectively and consistently play defense, so don’t get down on yourself if you don’t completely shut down a powerhouse in one match.

7

I agree with what has been said. Know your opponents’ weaknesses and routines. Make sure you have solid scouting and strategy. Basic knowledge of drive trains can be very useful. Read the rules carefully and pay attention to the head ref in drivers meetings, sometimes rulings on certain manoeuvres can vary between regionals and championships.

8

The AM14U3 came with a 10.71:1 reduction as standard, you can change the gear ratio to gear your robot faster or slower depending on what you want.

There are quite a few different ratios available 5.95:1, 8.45:1, 10.71:1 and 12.75:1

9

Before we even get into defensive driving we should talk about things you can do when you don’t have access to your robot. This years game is brutal if you know you are going in as a bruiser before you even hit the ground make sure the right people on the team know the right things about the robot. A good drive team can diagnose from the driver station what is going on with the robot and at the end of a match they need to be debriefed so when a robot gets to the pit possible kinks can be found and quickly eliminated. This is where a practice bot comes in really handy if you have one, otherwise its just about knowing your design.
If you don’t have a practice bot you always have information you could brush up on (besides what lies in the rule book). With the amount of matches being recorded going up year after year there is no end to videos you can learn from about what good drivers do. A good understand of the game is crucial to understanding what you can do that is defensive while also still being valuable to a team.
When people say defensive bot most people jump to a wall bot but being a successful defender doesn’t begin with just blocking shots. The safest way to stop a team from scoring isn’t by letting them take a shot and by you blocking it, its by not letting them have access to those shots in the first place. You don’t need a wall on a robot to stop shots if you instead stop an opposing team from even getting boulders in the first place then they can’t take the shots anyway. If you do commit to a wall or a structure then make the most out of it.Never get too bogged down playing defense on one robot to lose sight of the entire match.
For scouting if you are doing a lot of focus on defense pit scouts need information on drive bases and stand scouts should be looking for patterns in driving you can exploit.

All this being said a perfect defensive robot is in the others teams way all the time but never in the way of their own team.

10

Congratulations once again on winning Rookie All Star! You guys deserve it. I know you were disappointed by the hand you were dealt at North Bay but you took it all in stride and everyone was focused and got the job done. Robot issues aside, you impressed everyone with how well put together your team is.

As others have said, your priorities for defense are:

1 - don’t let them near the batter (play Pong - drive back and forth across the defense line, blocking their way in). Make them waste time trying to dodge you.

2 - if they get past you, bump into them, disrupt their ability to drive to their preferred shooting position. You don’t necessarily need to pin, just give them a good shove to knock them off and force them to realign over and over again.

3 - All the high goal shooters I’ve seen so far take a while to line up their shot. Generally they need to position themselves just right, then it takes a few seconds for some kind of aiming system to find its target, then spin up motors, then fire. Learn how long this takes. After slowing down access to their favourite spot, then forcing them to realign again and again, leave them alone for “not quite long enough”, then give them a good bump just as their shooter fires. Make them waste a bunch of time only to miss the target when they finally are able to fire!

4 - If one robot has come in and already fired its shot, and is on its way back out, and another robot is inbound, don’t bother continuing to block or bump the robot that’s leaving. Let it go, and focus on the incoming one. Of course if it’s just the one robot in the courtyard then feel free to block it, incoming and outgoing - slow it down as much as possible.

5 - train your human players to either get the boulders as close to the defense line as possible, for your offensive robots to have easy access, or to keep them inside your secret passage, where it is riskier for the opponent robot to waltz in and grab one. If they do go into your secret passage, go after them and bump them around. They will get a penalty for your contact! (Check with the ref before you do this, but according to the rules and the Q&A, this seems like a valid defense strategy)

6 - if they miss a shot, beat them to the ball, push it into your secret passage. Deny them the opportunity to grab it back and retry their shot.

7- as others have said, another way to play defense is to attach a nice tall opaque wall to your robot, not necessarily just to block/deflect flying balls but also to obscure the driver’s vision of their own robot. Maybe a big version of your team standard with the word “Checkmate” clearly visible? :slight_smile:

Best of luck and have fun at Worlds - hope to see you guys again!

11

Hey thanks! We were talking on thr bus ride back home and we were all super i pressed with your turret too btw. But going into defence for thr first match we were really worried we wouldnt hsve the power to push, adding weight would slow us down and add alot more work for the drive train. Do you think that that will be a problem? I dont want to reduce the gearing any lower as it is since we were pretty slow

12

Hey thanks! It was really awesome to meet you guys! You were so super nice to us the entire time and our media girl loved you guys since you did so much colab with us online! In the final two matches we did try the pong meathod against 1241 and it seemed to work pretty well so we will be playing with that again, rifining it a little. And the designers are aleready talking in hushed voices sbojt a sort of bulldozer just to be able to push the ball into the secret passage so thanks for these tips we’re diffinately going to take them to heart! And we hope to see you guys again soon!

13

As part of your holdback (30# of fabricated items), build a Boulder Blocker to make your robot just shy of the 54" height limit. Bolt it on when you get to Champs. IMHO, but it on all 4 sides of your robot, and put a cover to keep boulders out.

For low robots that shoot the high goal, the Blocker may be all you need. The rest you have to push around.