There were certainly some strong robots at Atlanta, as always. However, after all of the teams had played through seven matches, only two teams, Team 2868 Smoke and Mirrors and Team 577 Wreckers remained undefeated with 14 quality points each.
Thinking back, what strategies should have been used to overcome these strong offense teams?
I’m not saying anything but we were a fraction of a second from beating smoke and mirrors had a ball not gotten stuck but oh well. Smoke was hard to push and actually quite accurate when aimed right. Wreckers? The way they were defeated in the finals explains it all.
577 never played against us in quals. If they had, there’s a very good chance they wouldn’t have remained undefeated. Same with Smoke and Mirrors. I’m only saying such a bold statement because we had enough traction in 4 of our qual matches to score 100 points and then push away two other robots to defend and win (or almost win in 1 case) our matches with so-so alliance partners. We shut down some very high OPR bots, like 92 (Jr Bomb Squad), 154, 111, and 245. Was traction/defense an iWin button? No, but I think that one thing was something 2868 wouldn’t have expected at all.
577, 2888, and 1885 came up with a great lockdown strategy for elims that worked well until one match where things went wrong on defense and another match where there was a wierd burning smell coming from the primary scorer. Essentially, the defensive robot drove forward in auto. The offensive bot got the close chute then came over underneath the defensive bot and got the other chute on our side. In teleop, the defensive bot then fought for the third chute and went to play defense on the bot that got the fourth chute.
Defense plays a very important part in strategy, as I recall in some of the Franklin matches got pretty rough after teams had observed highly offensive robots like Smoke. Other teams as well that were efficient at scoring started being shadowed during matches, however as those teams adapted a defensive strategy, the offensive teams adapted as well so that they were still able to score.
Also, @ John_1102, I was not able to see it, but the match between you and Smoke must have been exciting and close.
@JesseK Yeah you guys pulled a number on us in that qualifying match, although if I recall we were 1 on 2 in that one. Also the Edison finals were really close. Until the finals your robot was the only individual robot we had to worry about because of your defensive capabilities.
With our Alliance we just had Tiki run defense while we did offense because with our fire speed we only needed 5-10 seconds of open shooting to win a game. If the servos on our wall lock-on hadn’t burnt out we were extremely difficult to stop.
1st time since 2005 that I haven’t been in Atlanta with 2008 & 2009 on the FTC Fields. One of a few things that I missed the most was seeing great FTC robot designs. Can posters to this thread as well as representatives for teams mentioned here upload robot pictures to the CD media gallery:)
Secondarily, has anyone started a FTC robot image gallery? Looking for resources to help the hundred plus potential new FTC teams in Texas.
APS:cool:
Exploding Bacon did not make it to Atlanta this year with FTC. We were only finalists in Florida (Smoke and Mirrors & Duck Tape destroyed us) lol. It was fun nonetheless and they truly deserved to go to Atlanta!
But here is a render of our robot!
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/35637
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/35635
Enjoy
Andrew Remmers
Team 1902 Co-president
Im going to talk to my website developer about starting the website called the RedAlliance strictly for FTC stuff and see what he says
Soooo I discovered something and I wanted to check if I was right. In Franklin match 80 something Our Team GForce set the divisional and Qualifing high score of 467 for both Divisions by ourselves due to our alliance partner flipping over. Which wasn’t beaten in Franklin or the DaVanci Finals but was beaten in Edison by a score of 560. But did we score the Official Single robot high score of the year??