In the past 4-5 years I’ve been around, I’ve only seen endgames that involve climbing besides nothing in 2015.
I think there have been others, but I don’t know them.
What would be a fun idea for an endgame WITHOUT climbing?
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Have another autonomous period for the endgame with some sort of, like, race around a track for the bots to complete
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Full field shooting.
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Little vague. Limited shooting range like some past events, then open field during the last 20s?
I’ve seen End Game now so spoilers are fine.
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2011 had the minibot end game. I wasn’t in FRC at the time, so I’ll let others say if it was a good idea or not.
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Yeah that’s what I was thinking of. Like 2016, being able to shoot from your own side during end game
Minibots as a concept were awesome. I would love to see them come back in some form. I suspect they were more fun for the teams than the spectators, just because teams built them so small and fast it was hard to follow what was happening from the stands. Maybe there’s a better task that minibots could do that doesn’t involve a race, like handling specific game pieces.
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If you count the “climbing” in 2018 the same as the “climbing” in 2019, then virtually every endgame is going to fit into the “climbing” and/or “parking” mold. Sure, there’s been tasks involving raising your robot off the floor of the field in four straight years, but there were three very distinct challenges associated with it. Hanging bars in 2016 & 2018 (with 2018 also having the dual-climb wrinkle), ropes in 2017, and platforms in 2019.
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How about an overhead tram? Connect to it and see how many loops you can do before T0.
Minor climb involved, but only an inch or two.
Your robot has to snap half the other robots out of existence.
But really, I like the idea of deploying minibots during the endgame. I also liked (I think it was) 2014’s endgame where you had to balance on a platform with a member from the opposing alliance.
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For all of its flaws, 2009 at least had a totally novel endgame: introducing special game pieces worth additional points near the end of the match (if your alliance had accomplished the prerequisite tasks to unlock them).
This concept could pretty much be applied to any game since (other than 2018, due to time-based scoring).
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I’d like to see an endgame which involves manipulating the same game piece in a different way. For instance, what if Aerial Assist saw teams putting the trackballs on top of the truss at the end, a la 2008?
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I think I would count a climb as a significant part of the challenge.
This would probably take the balance bridge out. I wasn’t there, but the challenge seemed to be the not falling over with another robot part.
Also, just hanging an inch or two off the ground like the Arial Assent low bar would not be counted as a climb here.
These other years would fit into those categories also. I agree that they all had distinctive differences.
Hanging bars:
-2004
-2010
-2013
-2016
-2018
Platforms:
-2006
-2007 (Most common way of getting the endgame points)
-2012 (Was pretty different from other platforms)
-2019
Ropes:
-2017
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Off-season events are pretty fond of doing this. I think it’s a cool concept that should be used more often.
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I may have overstated my point somewhat. There have been games with end-games that are not based on elevating your robot. The 2009 and 2011 endgames were particularly novel, and plenty of the games in the 2v2 alliance era had scoring determined on field status at the end of the match (1999 floppy height and 2002 goal/robot positions being the most notable “endgame” like tasks). But if one is to lump all the “climbing” challenges together, they are by far the most frequent. While I could certainly see an argument being made that the hanging bars in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2016, and 2018 (and perhaps even 2013) were all very similar, they are a distinctly different challenge than the ramps of 2003 and 2006, the robot lifts of 2007, the teeter totters of 2001 and 2012, the platform steps of 2019, or the ropes of 2017. My general point is that just because it’s a “climbing challenge” doesn’t mean that the engineering behind it is going to be the same. Lumping all these challenges together is rather silly, in my mind.
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The special game pieces were very novel, but they definitely lacked the suspense and intensity of other endgames. Plus to a casual observer, pretty much unnoticeable. They also didn’t require any extra engineering challenge, which makes endgames more interesting. This could be a cool concept to bring back if the game piece were unique from the standard game pieces.
This was my favorite endgame from my FRC career. Building a super minimal bot with just a battery, magnets, and motors was a ton of fun. Watching them rocket up the pole and frequently fly off after they hit the top was exciting. I’m really proud of the deployment mechanism we came up with that year; a violent surgical-tubing powered linear accelerator that was passively deployed when the arm hit the platform. In my opinion; It’s an endgame that resulted in more mechanism variety than other endgames in my era.
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Something like this could have mixed up the strategic design incentives in 2017. For example, in the last 20 seconds the low boiler could have become 2 balls = 1 point. For game balance, only 2 ropes would have been available for climbing.