They should talk to the GDC, that game is WAY better!
The game was indeed more fun that GOI!, but it wasn’t perfect. Dragging the rolling goals and no limits on the batons was quite fun, but the endgame seemed somehow more lacking than GOI.
(FTC GDC, if you are reading this, dragging game elements is a great idea for next year. just saying.)
Oddly enough, our robot seem more catered towards this game than GOI, and we (2753) would have done very well if we had been more familiar with our robot’s controls (no driving practice is a bad thing).
Same with us. We wouldn’t need to drag the goals using our robot, Aviator - we already made a controlling mechanism. Plus, with no mountain or cliffs, it’s as if the field was designed for our robot. However, when playing GOI, we had trouble maneuvering and facing defensive robots.
In the 2009 FRC game Lunacy they had trailers behind robots on a low friction field. It was definitely entertaining to watch the robots chasing each other down…
The down side is all the penalty (how to differentiate between ramming intentionally / to score) or the pinning rules… It’s going to make the refs and teams very frustrated since most of them are really subjective…
And I can see parts falling off robots in some cases… FTC don’t have bumper rules. :rolleyes:
The unlimited amount of batons definitely is a plus. I think the GDC saw that last year at World’s most teams just collect / hoard all the balls till the end game and score in the outside goal so there was not much scoring during regular tele-op… But now this year was opposite since if a team has a significant lead after autonomous they’d just play defense.
This year’s game favors autonomous significantly as Ken mentioned in September… Especially with the 5 baton limitation making teams nearly impossible to reverse a match. (if both teams balanced then they would only get the same amount of score and at high level competition such as World’s, the maximum point gain differential can result from the end game is 20 points, one alliance have all 4 elements and the other alliance having both robots)
The problems with this year’s game (I think):
Too much emphasis on autonomous
Little to no scoring of batons in regular tele-op
End-game is essential, not a bonus to scoring
There are many teams out there that spent many hours trying to have a good autonomous but only stopped by a ramming auto that takes not nearly as much time to do. Strategic wise it makes sense because it evens the score but it discourages many teams to spend more time on autonomous like the GDC wanted.
And when teams’ autonomous did what they wanted to and gave them a huge lead their work is paid off because they can just play defense during tele-op. But it significantly decreased the excitement of the match. (Remember last year, when everyone cheers when the bonus ball is scored? Or when an unstoppable team scores around the center goal? That was exciting… Not only because it’s fun to watch, but it also decides who wins / loses; unlike this year’s game when both alliances with the same # of elements balancing on the bridge, and people applaud because they tied the tele-op score since no batons was scored and people knew who won already because one alliance had the lead after autonomous.)
Out of curiosity, how many teams here like the interaction of robots in FTC?
And why or why not?
I agree. That was our problem - we designed our robot to score tons of batons. However, since we were big, it was difficult to balance and we were easily defended against.
I think our problem may have been that we designed our robot like we did for Hot Shot - to score as much as possible. However, this strategy was not the one that won games. A reliable, fast and simple robot could win very easily this year. Next year, our team will probably concentrate on trying to make a better way to play the game instead of trying to make a better robot.
Our least favorite part of the game was the lack of space… the central elements meant that everyone jammed onto one side and made for boring play… If there’d been more places to get the batons, scoring would have played a higher role in the game.
FTC don’t have bumper rules.
I haven’t seen an FTC robot go fast enough to literally rip other parts of other robots or seriously damage other bots. Still Hopes this does not happen Bumpers are a pain enough in FRC, no fun to make! However there would be an upside, you would only have to design to have bumpers mounted on the bot and put your numbers there. But I think that bumpers would take away from half the awesomeness an FTC bot is when its seriously engineered like…
These guys:
or These guys
http://www.technoguards.org/node/361
I wish I they had galleries or more pictures but those are two of the bots I remember from this year. I really didn’t get to see many others besides the ones in my state 
- Andrew
All of the bots from world this year are in a gallery by tetrixrobotics.com:
You can find three pictures of ours at:
http://www.tetrixrobotics.com/Competitions/Gallery/default.aspx?moid=1042
Thanks for the link, Nala! I love looking at all of the robots. One of the disadvantages of being on the drive team is not being able to just walk around and look at all of the other robots. I really wish I had more time to do that this year, but those pictures will do.
And Joyride, I remember you asking for our cad imaging a while back, but I forgot to respond. We actually have never used cad, we just prototype by trial and error, see what works and improve on it. The pictures from the tetrix site are probably the best, we didn’t have the time to take too many this year. If you have any questions about our robot I’d be glad to answer them.
and those where before worlds (so its missing most of the stickers)
