Watching the week 0 events on livestream today, It looks like the balls are mostly being ignored or play no role even in elimination matches. Many elimination matches have a final score that has pressure scores of 9 to 10 or even 0 to 0. Hanging and gears seem to be the only way points are scored.
Personally, I think the fuel will not start to matter until week 4. Even then, a great gear robot with a climber will still out score most average fuel robots. It won’t be until the district championships that having a shooter will be required to be competitive.
What do you all think of this observation? Is it valid? How long do you think the fuel will stay like this?
The biggest question however is this:
If fuel still doesn’t matter in week 3, would you consider ripping off the shooter/intake of your robot in exchange for other features?
But will MY robot ever do that? Of course the poofs of the world are going to score every single point available. However the average team is not the poofs. Most of us are not going to be scoring 99% accurate with 7 balls a second.
Fuel will matter after few weeks and especially in World Champs.
All three robots that are good in gear will likely to create bottle neck at loading station. At NH event today there were few tines robot had to wait to get the gear as their alliance partner was at the station wiggling to align itself. Couple of robots were awesome zooming across field. You will be better off pushing or lifting the gear that falls near lift. So you don’t get penalized during the next round,
Overall I am impressed with the scores and some good/fast shooting, gear runs.
Well, so that will be your strategy. If one cannot be poofs, we can stick to what’s best for us. I agree, many teams can skip shooting, that too accurate shooting.
How wrong you are on so many levels. In this game being able to score fuel will have a bigger impact on how the game is played than the being able to manipulate gears. And here is why: most teams will be manipulating gears, and if you have chosen to be a fuel specialist then they have already seen the value of shooting; therefore since most team will be able to manipulate a gear, scoring gears should be fairly prevalent. When it comes to climbing, from what I have seen the ratio of climbers will more than likely be fairly even on both alliances.
Therefore the difference makers in these matches will come down to the ability to score fuel at a high level. Stripping off your shooter would not only be a terrible idea because you are hampering your own ability to play the game but you become infinitely less valuable to an alliance in eliminations.
Also you said that you didn’t think that fuel would start to matter until week 4. So why is your self imposed deadline of week 3 for fuel to matter? That doesn’t really make since. You should at least give yourself until your own deadline to see if something is going to matter or not. Also as a comparison to last year the same thing could be said for shooting into the tower. Most teams in the early weeks were just focused on crossing defenses, and the difference maker in matches came down to how many balls you could shoot into the tower.
Saying that fuel doesn’t matter is terribly short sighted and I would strongly consider that you take the time to reconsider this position. Especially after you have seen an actual regional.
Easier RP (1/2 win); Example 40 HE in auto, ranking higher
Unlimited nearby scoring
Tiebreaking points; to earn the other 2 RP ;1 Point can make a difference
Fairly easy 80 (40+40) in playoffs if good
One could argue gear ability is redundant …if the other two do gears well.
In short, Fuel matters from a strategy standpoint and is a difference maker at every level.
Edit: What I witnessed in person tonight, makes me feel even more that fuel matters. Hope we can dial it in, at competition.
I think watching week 0 scrimmages can be deceiving. Teams have 3 days of build time left. You can build a whole robot in that time!!!
I doubt if there was a great shooter at a scrimmage, the elims wouldn’t have it there.
Week 1 we’ll see a good deal of poor shooters and a few amazing shooters. And those who shoot and gear and climb will be more heavily showing in the top 8 than just gear robots.
The official week 0 average score last year was ~50. The week 1 average scores last year was ~70, which would correspond to a 40% increase in average scores between week 0 and week 1.
Just from looking at the limited data from TBA on week 0, of the 11 matches with scores available on TBA, 3 of them were “close” matches (<= 10 point difference). In each of those “close” matches, fuel was not the deciding factor in determining the winning alliance. In fact, the deciding factors seemed to be auto mobility, gears scored in auto, and climbing.
Note that this sample size is incredibly small and the conclusions that you can draw about strategy based on this data are incredibly limited. We’ll have to wait for more data before any definite strategic inferences can be drawn.
I was at a Week 0 event today, Suffield Shakedown, and while it appears that fuel doesn’t seem to matter, it’s pretty clear (like the others before me have said) that fuel will become an integral part of the game in later weeks.
A lot of the teams I talked to today had shooters in some shape or form, but many of them still had to work out all the bugs and polish their systems before achieving desirable performance.
These things take time to develop, and similarly (drawing upon the Stronghold parallel here lmao), last year the early competitions during Weeks 1 and 2 were dominated by low goal cyclers and effective breachers before high goal shooters began to rise to the top after hitting optimal accuracy and cycle efficiency.
FRC games have a tendency to evolve over time, and I guarantee that the game being played during Week 6 and after will be an entirely different beast than what we’ve seen at Week 0 events.
Please don’t scrap your shooter/intake for other features, take time during the competition season to watch more matches and iterate your design along the way into something you can be proud of.
For many teams (like mine) my guess is Week 0 is the first time fuel shooting has been done on anything resembling a full field. Three days is a lot of time to work if you dial in and know exactly what went wrong. I expect to see significantly higher fuel accuracy and output in the first few weeks.
What has been said in this thread is pretty good, I’d like to add my own thoughts. I was at the NH today with the rest of the 5459 drive team (spectating) and our team’s strategy revolves around gears.
Week 0 is terrible for shooters. Shooters require some dialing in. At this point, no team is accurate enough to score any decent amount of points. In a week or two, we should be seeing most of these high goal teams dialing in their shooters and getting some balls in that goal. Week 0 is just a chance to practice a bit on the field. It’s just for practice, most of the strategies developed are not going to reflect the final state of the game because the robot mechanisms simply have not been finalized at this stage. Heck, our robot probably won’t reach its final state till its second district event or even after.
Hopefully, having attended the official week zero in New Hampshire, I can shed some light on what you saw and what made you create this thread.
Many teams chose not to attach their shooters at all the entire day. Team 78 is a great example of this. Typically they are one of the top teams in New England and they had a shooter ready to use but never put it on. From talking to them, they decided that week 0 would be more useful to them as testing for their floor gear intake.
Many teams simply decided to focus only on gears and climbing. (4905, 3467, 88, etc)
Some teams were more interested in perfecting specific robot functions than in scoring points. They can feel free to correct me if they see this, but 1519 seemed to spend much of their time working on their autonomous robot functions. (For reference, they typically dominate NE district in their auto performance)
Some teams proved functionality of their shooter and weren’t too interested in shooting because it was less valuable to spend time shooting when you can spend that time practicing more specific driving challenges on the field. Team 125 comes to mind here. They very early on had a robot shooting around 15balls/sec with great precision, from then on it was more beneficial to practice other aspects of the match.
To any team mentioned here: If you disagree or would like to add additional comments please reply or feel free to PM me. Your teams came to mind simply because they were the robots I was most impressed with.
We all (those who were at week 0 event and those who watched online) can take lot of things that we did not consider for strategy. I am hoping feedback from pilots from teams who were at week 0. I want to hear from their point of view, how teams can train their pilots.
Some robots did not climb all the way up to activate light, if your team was this in situation, can you share the reason, if its shareable? Thank you.
I can take the first part of your question, I’m not a pilot but I did drive, and talked a lot with our pilot.
Make sure they remember to drop the ropes at 30s. Currently the buzzer goes at 20, which might not give you time to line up. Have them watch for the lights on the touchpads to flash, then they should drop ropes.
If you pull up the lift really fast, the gear might fall off.
Ropes can and will get caught by the velcro strap holding them when you try to release them, which keeps your rope from falling to the floor. After this happened to us, multiple FTA’s came to us to let us know that YES, it is legal for your pilot to reach outside the airship to release the rope if it gets stuck.
That’s about all the pilot and I talked about that could be relevant.