I apologize in advance if this was brought up before, but I haven’t found anything on the topic.
Say you had a robot without an arm. Strategically, you could just take tetras from the human player and depositing them into the goal and repeating. Also, I guess you could play some sort of defense, possibly going as far as to remove tetras from the opponent’s goal. You could also get some tetras onto the field if requested. You would get back to the line for the bonus 10 pts. if applicable.
Now my question is, seeing as this strategy only nets a few points, would you call this 'bot valuable to the alliance? I sort of feel that in order to be liked by your alliance partners you have to get points and be offensive. Would you not pick a team with our strategy in the playoffs? Are we worth anything to other teams - do we have any value?
Basically, in the past have the successful teams been the ones with gung-ho offensive tactics that get many points, or can the little guys succeed as well, even though they may not contribute as many points in the end?
Do you need an arm to make a difference in the match? Do defensive, low scoring tactics work? What makes a “winning robot”? What are your thoughts?
Defensive tactics most definitely do work. Take a look at the last few years national champions. The scores may not be low, but defense played a HUGE roll in last few Championships.
2004 -All of the alliance’s that made it to Einstein had great offensive robots in their alliance(469, 71, 67, 175). What set 71, 494, and 435 apart, was defense. 494 could play defense till the last 20 or so seconds then go hang.
2003- wildstang would get a lead in autonomous mode, then sit at the top of the ramp and defend their lead till the buzzer.
2002- well, there wasn’t much anybody could do to stop Beaty
2001-wasn’t a whole lot of point to defense here(four on none)
2000- well before my time. Maybe some of the guys that have been around for longer can fill in the gaps.
Defensive tactics work better in eliminations, when all your concerned with is winning. Qualifying rounds are a different story all together.
I will argue the case for stacking, just to play devil’s advocate.
Suppose Redabot can pick up tetras from the human player, then stack them. We’ll say Redabot stacks three tetras. Worst case scenario, Redateam just scored nine points. If it’s a row, we’re talking nineteen.
Then consider Bluabot. It’s a box on wheels. It also takes tetras from the human player, but it sends them underneath the goal. In order to match the scoring potential of Redabot, Bluabot will have to get those tetras under the goal three times as fast as Redabot can stack (as it would have to score nine tetras to Redabot’s three to score nine points). If we assume Redabot is making rows, that speed for Bluabot balloons to roughly six times as fast in order to keep pace.
And Redabot’s got the advantage of keeping at least those nine points, no matter what happens. So I’ll ask the question–do you feel lucky?
but how would the score look if Bluabot played defense and blocked Redabot from scoring any tetras instead of trying to keep up with Redabot. instead of being at a six point (at least!) deficit, blaubot and redabot would break even. blaubot could conceivably cancel out a much higher scoring opponent without ever touching a tetra.
This is true–however, this field seems to offer plenty of Plans B. If Bluabot is blocking you, win a shoving match. Or whistle for a partner to come over and dance with Bluabot for a while. Or, retreat and head for the nearest wall–there’s three more goals there.
Unless there is a wall involved (and there isn’t too much wall this year, as the goals and loading zones take up quite a healthy piece of real estate), it’d take the majority of the Blue alliance to stop one offensive Redabot.
I’ll be very interested to see if defense is as powerful as it has been in the past.
Bluabot won’t be able to completely stop redabot from scoring. There are just way too many goals to try and defend.
The rules, also, lean toward offense, with the rules about the loading zones and de-scoring.
Yeah, all redabot has to do is score once then bluabot has to take a break from defending and go and score four tetras to take the lead back, and while it does that redabot goes and scores four more itself, so bluabot has to go and score twelve more giving redabot time to score twelve more… see a pattern? What happens if a match is tied… like say tied at 0-0?
I disagree. Remember 2003, the Crates . The stealth hedgehog (our robot) could stack the boxes, but everytime it tried, the stack just got knocked over, by a “defensive” low point scoring robot…
I would like to think that one bluabot could hold up one or 2 of the redabots, giving the rest of redalliance a break to score more points. however, if there is a defensive robot on both teams, then they could just get into a shoving match … … …
Everybody keeps looking at this argument in an “all or nothing” fashion. I’m personally convinced that most of the elimination matches will involve one of the 3 robots playing “zone defense” on the other side of the field while the other 2 try to rack up points. The difference between winning and losing in many of these matches will be strategy of play.
Ever heard “The best offense is a good Defense.”??
If one teams on an alliance is a box on wheels, and the other two can score points, that box can go be a PITA to the other team… very effective… just hope you dont get stuck with 2 or 3 boxes on wheels for a match…
j
I predict even if you’re in a seeding match and all 3 teammates can cap. The one that’s slower at it, or so so - will get relegated to this job regardless of their capping capability. It’s an important aspect to cancel out the best capper of the opposing alliance with your weaker hand. Although if you had an alliance with 3 so so cappers against a 2 box bot and 1 good capper. I would attempt to out cap that 1 capper with all 3 of ours, and let the box bots take their shots. But I think the standard strategy will be at least 1 teammate playing that defensive “cancel out the opposing fast capper” role. On the other hand like it was said, you don’t want to wind up with 2 or 3 of these on a team.
In the finals, these defensive chassis will get serious consideration during picks. But only if there drivers are effective. Simply bringing the chassis to the field doesn’t qualify it. If you’re going this route, you should be done with your build sooner and give your drivers as much time as possible to get good at blocking.
I think the winning team of regionals/nats will either consist of 3 good to great cappers. Or 2 good to great cappers and 1 really good defensive chassis. But the common denominator will be the best drivers and coach strategies. I don’t see how a team consisting of 1 great capper and 2 defensive chassis can win at the top level. Reason, it’s too easy to plow through a pile of bots and block that “great” capper. And if there’s just one to focus on, with 2 chasing them down, it’s just going to be a big pileup fest. I will say from experience though that blocking is very hard to do. Especially if your chasing a good driver/capper with a good chassis.
Defensive bots can generally drive around the opposite side and get in the way of robots that are trying to cap. If blue caps a goal on red’s home row, and details a blue defensive bot to ferociously defend that goal, blue has denied red 10 pts (from their complete home row) and given their team the potential for two more lines and 20pts.
Defense will probably play a larger role in this competition than in any previous one. Since there are three robots per alliance, teams can afford to have a robot not scoring points for them.
One word of warning though, dont be too effective in defense in the seeding rounds, as you get your opposing alliance’s points.
A defensive bot is really just a robot that can push harder and probably drive a tad better than another robot. So the result is that the strongest robot gets to do what it wants. Thats kind of a generalization. Even the strongest robot will get hampered by a weak robot playing defense assuming they don’t completely outclass their opponent(4wd bot vs 2wd bot)
So that being said, every single team should try to have the strongest drivetrain it possibly can. If your stacking mechanism doesn’t work you’ll have a great backup plan. If it does work, then you’ll be able to force your way through other robots.
That being said, i think defensive robots will play a key roll in this years game. Having a robot capable of stopping a cap that will alter the rows significantly will be a huge asset. Now that being said, this year you can’t rely on defense. That won’t cut it by itself. The team will be able to cap one tetra on a defensive robots watch this year. There are just too many options available. Each alliance will need to find the balance between capping and defense. It could be two defensive robots, one capper. Maybe two cappers and two defensive robots. The top alliance in Atlantawill probably include three fairly good cappers, of which one or two can play solid defense also. But at the regionals I’ll take a bet that only two of the three alliance bots will be able to cap, thus forcing a designated defender.
<G25> Strategies aimed solely at the destruction, damage, tipping over, or entanglement of ROBOTS are not
in the spirit of FIRST Robotics Competition and are not allowed.
While a box on wheels may not exactly be in violation of this rule I see this rule as being an attempt to discourage strictly defensive strategies, and I personally dont think they are in the spirit of the game. Whatever.