I’m a rookie in a rookie team and my team hasn’t developed its final strategy yet.
I look for some advice as to the strategy of the play. As far as I know there’s no rule that prohibits blocking other robots and preventing them from scoring rows during the whole game. Including the autonomous period of game.
That as long as you do not intend to cause them any damage.
This brought me the idea , that maybe it’s not going to pay off if you just put those keepers because the other team might do it as well.
So I thougt about some different approach to this question (I’m not going to reveal my team’s strategies all I’m doing is I’m sharing an opinion).
And my opinion is that the game might be just decided in other ways.
Let’s suppose that 1 robot in the alliance scores a keeper and 1 other robot keeps this robot from bumping into enemy robots whereas the 3rd blocks 1 of enemy robots from scoring a keeper.
What do you think ? First, is it legal ?
Do you think that there’s anything in what I say ?
Legal, as long as no safety or interaction rules are broken (see Section 7). Doable? Slightly different question. Can you work with your partners this way? If so, go for it. If not, hope your opponents don’t play this way. The biggest problem is not seeing which side you’ll be hit from by defense bots. (not terribly big) The other problem? Actually placing the keeper.
There is definitely merit in this sort of strategy - effective blocking is always a skill which can change the outcome of a match. Some robots are designed to be the “blocker” bot on a team, the problem is that if two or even three robots oriented towards blocking end up on a team together, youre in a bad situation. Dont forget that seeding rank is determined first by number of wins, losses, and ties, and then is further sorted by the number of qualifying points your team has received (aka the average of the losing team`s points scored in all of your seeding matches). Thus, even if a team wins by mostly blocking, they will be usually seeded below a team that wins by mostly scoring.
Anyhow, I think it`s more exciting to score and really play the game then to rely on a winning strategy. In the past my team has always opted for the most fun bot design over the most likely to win design.
Well the score of the losing team only matters if two teams are tied in terms of wins and losses. So low scoring only hurts you in terms of a tiebreaker.
For the strategy I might use it if there is a really dominant scorer on my team I want to protect but other than that I probably would not bother.
Anyway, be careful that you don’t ram the other robots when you’re dashing across the field to get in their way. Maybe ultrasonic rangefinders, etc could be useful.
Actual quote from 2005:
“Ramming in autonomous? That’s not even a rule, is it?”
After one of the programmers forgot to take out his test autonomous code,
if (time < 3 seconds) { FULL SPEED AHEAD! }
Last year’s rulebook doesn’t differentiate between teleoperated blocking and autonomous blocking. At the driver’s meeting in Atlanta we were told that high speed long distance ramming in autonomous would not be penalized unless it occurred within a starting box, as that was the only way they could objectively judge intent. At our regional (BAE) ramming was not called in autonomous. I’m sure this will be clarified in the Q&A.
To the thread starter, I would suggest going back and looking at some of the discussions on this forum that occured last year regarding autonomous. Essentially, blocking last year in autonomous was a very viable strategy, as there was a wide open field. In Atlanta with the Championship title on the line the alliance led by 25 (one of the most talked about robots), decided to go completely defensive and keep the alliance led by 296 from scoring. Unfortuneatly those pesky CMUcams did their jobs, and 296 and company still scored.
Also, autonomous scoring may be difficult this year, or it may be easy, we simply don’t know yet. If it is relatively easy, a high seed will most likely be searching for a more defensive robot for his/her second pick. Reason being the serpentine draft tends to get rid of the most effective scorers before the they get to pick again. So a decent scorer with above averasge defensive abilitilites may be a decent bet at getting picked during the second round. We’ll see come March…
Thanks for the comments but I think I’m gonna consider other strategies because there are two main reasons why this is a somewhat problemetic choice:
No guarantee that the robot will interfere with other alliance’s robots because they are equiped with the CMUcams and there’s always the possibility the other alliance thought about such defensive play and acted accordingly writing their algorithms.
Second, it might be as well in the end a matter of how many points you score rather than how you think the other alliance would play.
In reply to iCurtis:
Could you share some more experience with us please ?:rolleyes:
I wish my team would make it to Atlanta
As it seems now , I would be satisfied with its making it to Tel Aviv at least
No guarantee that the robot will interfere with other alliance’s robots because they are equipped with the CMUcams and there’s always the possibility the other alliance thought about such defensive play and acted accordingly writing their algorithms.
If you look at most teams from last year, autonomous programming hasn’t quite been advanced enough to do anticipate the defensive play you were talking about. Most of the autonomous programs consisted of drive forward, aim, shoot. A simple ram straight ahead into the opponent shooter strategy actually worked pretty well for deterring many teams from scoring. It was very simple to write a program to just turn on two motors, as compared to the program to track the vision targets. The only times that I personally saw teams counteracting the defense strategy was in the Florida regional finals, where robots would launch out and cover the alliance shooter robots from getting rammed. But this event was fairly rare. This year, a simple “ram the rack” could easily screw up the most elegantly planned autonomous program.
Don’t discount the effectiveness of a simple defense.
Why don’t you build a robot that drives aroung, gets in the way, and then deploys two twelve inch ramps at the the end of the match so that you can lift the rest of your alliance.
Defense is going to be huge this year, even more so than last year. Scoring the inner tubes is not an easy task, arguably harder than shooting the poof balls. I think a very effective alliance partner would be a strong defensive robot with ramping capabilities. We considered building a strong defensive robot for this years game because it would be a very successful strategy. I always love good defensive robots, and would like to build one.
My team and I have always felt that a scoring robot with a strong durable mobility system should be just as adept at scoring and defense why not do both.
Im also on a rookie team # 2016 and we considered this sort of robot but eventually desided that like Netherlander said a robot could do both just as easily a s one and would create a much higher point differential (not sure if thats proper spelling)
I feal that defence this year isn’t going to be as important as it was last year, or even the year before with stacking tetras. Its going to be very difficult for a defensive bot to effectively drive around the rack and see their robot enough to manuever around blocking.
I think its going to be more of score your side of the rack and then protect it. Maybe throw in a spoiler if you have the capabilities.