What did everybody take away from the district championship events? How did alliance selections work out? What types of alliance structures were most effective? How did Switch specialists do with all of the great Scale bots at the events? Are we going to run out of cubes at the highest levels of play?
Yes.
We were “running out of cubes” in quals. It can only become more severe from here I imagine.
Don’t fall behind, because it’s real hard to catch up. It gets harder to place the cubes, and it takes longer to retrieve them. It’s real hard to have 3 robots placing on the scale, so you’ve either got to sequence and not make mistakes, or have one robot focus on a switch or the vault. You won’t rank highly without a climber.
Also (from NE DCMP), there have been several qual matches where an alliance of three switch bots beats an alliance of 2-3 scale bots. Takeaway - if you’re a scale bot, be able to play the switch well too, since they’re important too.
We found that with all the great scale bots here, it was an effective strategy for us to go for switch and exchange much more than scale, since we felt that our division (DTE @ MSC) was saturated with good scale bots. We ended up doing really well throughout quals, and ended up as #8 captain, where we picked 2 really good scale bots and almost upset #1 (who made it to division finals).
Personally, I feel that any switch/exchange bot needs to be able to do exchange rapidly while still being able to defend effectively. Being able to shut out opponent scale bots coming to the portal while still getting enough cubes for levitate and another powerup is key in my opinion.
It was great playing with you guys. We had a real shot of pulling the upset, but we gave them a great run. I think you are right and during FIM Championship playoffs we saw that there was not nearly as much vault play, the cubes had to be saved for defending the switch or occasionally to be used for scale play. Also, with alliances that are fairly equal on scale play, the side with the best scale autos usually stayed in front.
Buddy climbs, at least at MSC, seemed to be less important for ranking than they were throughout the season. In many matches, two robots were able to climb next to each other.
Portals are being used. Make sure your human players know how to use them properly.
Definitely was the same way at ONDCMP, having a really good side or tether climb like 4917 could be more valuable than a buddy climb due to the time needed to line up. Because of the higher level of competition late game play was more valuable.
Agree on the portals and the need for human players to stay aware and ready to feed cubes. We had several times we drove up to the portal and waited until the Human Player realized we were there. The human players need to have a cube ready to go and feed it quickly when the robot is ready. We started talking this in our prematch discussions.
My favorite video that I’ve seen this year about this… is a robot drove up to a portal for their alliance, and the human player didn’t push out the cube…like he was asleep or something. The robot even rammed the wall in front of him, still no cube.
People have needed to use the portals since Week 1 at some events. I think by “running out of cubes” they mean there are no available game pieces left, something that has been somewhat rarely seen.
May or may not have happened to us on occasion…
Then there was the one at PNW champs where a robot drove up to the other alliance’s portal, bumped the wall, and the human player gave him a cube.
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Autos win games
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Human players, watch the zone where you’d be dropping a cube, not your robot.
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The portal on the exchange zone is more beneficial than you think (found here). The hesitation on Red 3452 at around 60 seconds was me communicating to our human player to put the cubes back onto the field, which was total improv. We were able to have 6-7 cubes in the vault, and if blue started playing switch defense we were able to come back and use the ones we needed from the vault to maintain switch ownership.
H14. POWER CUBES stay in the VAULT. POWER CUBES may not be removed from the VAULT.
Violation: FOUL. If strategic (i.e. re-used in a different column within the VAULT or introduced to
the FIELD), RED CARD.
Agreed! The performance during Auto will determine much this year, AFAIK.
Those bots that can take the scale with 3 power cubes and their own switch in Auto will set the bar, and it will be a challenge to recover from there for any opposing Alliance.
Wrapping a match up with the ability to gain the Levitate bonus and two Bots climbing to Fight the Boss, I call that a Power Up Squeeze Play tough to beat.
I’m pretty sure what they mean is that when you have cubes yet to be placed in the vault, but already delivered to the driver station. Seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy.
However, if they are never placed in the vault (eg, they are stacked beside the Vault), then they may be introduced to the Field.