Hi All,
This year was my first year as a mentor and I have question for all the veteran FRC historians.
What are some of your game designs from the past and why?
I’d like to run our strategy team through some old games to give them some practice digesting a rule book and developing a high level approach.
2011 - harder to see the more successful you were.
Robots were slower then, probably not a great game with today’s hardware and controls.
What is considered “old”? Is it safe to say Stronghold (2016) is not a valid answer?
From a strategy perspective the game felt different with the audience participation and semi-random obstacles. But the core elements of fast cycles, climbing endgame and dealing with dead or stuck alliance partners was there definitely.
They’ve all* got their charms; if this question is asking, “which game did I enjoy the most at the time,” then my clear answer would be 2012 or 2016. If this question is asking, “which game would I like to try again,” then I’d say 2005 or 2009.
excluding the catastrophes of Recycle Rush and Steamworks
If I was around 2017, I would do anything to be the human player. Being inside the field is so cool!
Since I started attending FRC in 2017, I haven’t seen many games, but from my list based off of YouTube experience, I like 2006, and then the games from 2011-2013, add in 2016-2019.
I would say for your applications the 2012-16 area is where you want to look at.
Personally, 2008. This isint a comment on its game design i just want more racing style games.
Iirc 2006 is fairly beloved if you want to jump back from modern FRC. Theres even a book on it, but the name escapes me right now.
Even if it wasn’t my favourite game, I always thought 2007 with it’s scoring structure that’d move/jiggle on impact and endgame which had robots parked on top of each other was super unique from a design perspective. Exponential scoring was also cool.
I’d love to see it repeated more than any other 3v3 era game seeing as it’s already happened.
You’re probably thinking of the “Behind The Design” series of books they did for 2006, 2007, and 2015. They were selling the 2007 edition at champs this year and it’s a pretty cool read.
2011 is my favorite example of a poorly designed game. Minibots were horrendously game breaking.
The defenses in 2016 were great from a strategy and mechanical design perspective. 2013 had some interesting strategy w/r/t full field shots or passes versus shuttling. 2010 was the last year with a game-breaking loophole (which I think only two teams that year found and exploited). 2017 would have been interesting from a strategy perspective if the fuel was worth more points; the GDC didn’t anticipate teams going all-in on gear shuttling (however, it’s still my personal favorite game because it’s the only blue banner that 2084 has ever earned)
I often wonder at what point value the calculus of focusing on fuel would have make sense. Having such a surplus of durable scoring elements all over the field is such a fun design.
I still think 2004 is goated, but 2006 is goated with the sauce. Wide open shooting for the most part, but also teams that could only dump could still contribute at a fairly high level. And the autonomous chess match is perfection–even a box on wheels could contribute and influence the entire flow of the match.
And if climbs were worth less. Climbs being worth half a match’s points in quals and a 1/3 of the points in elims (bc rotor bouns) was incredibly warping which made robots who couldn’t climb unpickable if there was one that could and lead to death by serpentine simply by not being able to pick a 3rd bot that could climb. Imo, climbs should’ve been worth 30 points while fuel should’ve been worth 1/2 a point.
I don’t quite agree with the hate for the lopsided scoring or 2017. To me, it presented an interesting shift in the meta as the season progressed. Climbs won districts, gears won dcmps, and fuel won worlds.
2017 may have been a more fun game if anybody could have seen it. That was the worst game for visibility - whether you were a scout, drive team member, or spectator - and it suffered greatly for it.
Compound that with putting the HPs in the middle of the field, where they were on full display, and any error, slip, or mistake went to instant meme status, and it was a recipe for awful. Not to mention the Draconian rules that forced the Head Referees to make some nasty (but within the spirit of the game) calls against well-meaning HPs.
I don’t like the lopsided scoring because it one-dimensionalizes the meta. Not having 3 climbs or 4 rotors (in elims) being an immediate loss for most teams (yeayea 1986 could win on fuel) means you have to do those things and can’t make up the points by like being extremely good at fuel. There wasn’t really another way to play the game than climb, gears, and fuel in that order. Compared to many other games with more balanced scoring (trap, traversal climb, hab3…), if your alliance had a worse endgame, it wasn’t an immediate loss because you could make the points by scoring a few extra cycles.
Ive been in this since Frenzy but i think my favorite overall is Stronghold. The aspect of a changing field (albeit an absolute nightmare for field reset and match timings) was a cool and dynamic way of shaking things up while simultaneously making things more interactive and exciting for the audience. The theme was integrated really well also. There were several different challenges you could do and to me it seemed pretty well balanced in terms of skills and scores. Not to say it didnt have issues but its my favorite overall
There’s a short and long answer to this question. The short answer is go through as many as you can; I expect our strategy students to know FRC game history back to 2013. However, I understand that I go a little overboard on that.
If you were to only cover one or two games, I think these would be the best games to train strategy students:
2011 - Great for teaching analytical projects. The question I always ask is "How many gamepieces do I have to score to guarantee I win the match assuming I play optimally and get 1st and 2nd or 1st and 3rd in end game? (will give 2 different answers).
2014 - Match Flow, Alliance Roles, Dependent Scoring System, Is High Goal Worth It
2017 - Multiple Game Pieces, Specialization, Non-Linear Scoring System, Very interesting opposing Strategies
2019 - Multiple Game Pieces, Dependent Scoring , Null Hatch Panels, Climb Analysis, Great for training Kickoff analysis
2024 - Recent (good since they already have context but bad if they already know the answers), Very different strategies, Lots of Tradeoffs
If you want to give your strategy team a good practice, I would recommend the 2007 game. It seems very simple, but there is a lot of strategy needed and in-match decisions used.
To me, it feels like a game of chess (Where do put the rings?, Should you sacrifice a row of rings in an attempt to stop your opponents from making a row?, etc.).
And I think after the plethora of shooting games we’ve had in the more modern era people forget - that was largely the first time FRC launched anything long distances. The sense of “wait, we’re doing what?” was really cool.