Personally, it was my first year competing, but me and my team loved the competition this past year. Our alliance finished 8th place in the Lake Superior Regional. I thought the theme could effectively showcase our team’s creativeness, along with the engineering and execution of ways to do well. I did feel that some of the obstacles were much too simple, as well as that the game got slow after all the defenses were breached. Overall, I loved this competition. How did you feel?
I though that Stronghold was a pretty good game. The amount of abuse the robots take was a unique engineering challenge, and the low bar required prioritizing some things over others, or having creative ways of making things compact. Still, almost every team (at least in CHS) built a breaching/low goal robot that could fit under the low bar. If high goals were worth more (10 rather than 5, maybe), I think it would have led to more diversity of designs at the lower levels.
In comparison to other years, I maintain that Aerial Assist was better, but that’s my personal opinion. Still, on my team at least, this was one of our best years in terms of engineering. We properly went through the design process, and built one of our best robots ever, according to mentors. Unfortunately, we lost a week and a half due to a blizzard, meaning that we had very little practice.
I would agree that this game was good, but 2014 was better. Hopefully, next year’s game is as good as Stronghold and nothing at all like the awful recycle rush.
I’m gonna get a ton of flack for this but I enjoyed Recycle Ru$h more.
Maybe it was because we had a better robot for 2015 but I’m not sure.
Another thing that made this game a pain was how difficult it was to scout, and how specific the rules were. It was so easy to get a foul this year that it really ruined the game for me.
Yeah, I remember 2014 being significantly worse on the fouls front that this year. 2016 is worse than 14 because of fouls is a funny argument to me.
This was almost certainly my favorite game that I’ve been directly involved with. 2013 loses out only because of the cool strategic layer that changeable defences brought to the game. So, I feel pretty darn good about Stronghold.
I thought this year has been the best/most interesting FRC season I have been a part of. The quantity of different activities a robot had the option of doing (between the defenses, boulders, and scaling) was awesome. Every match looked different. For example, in 2014, every match was: get the ball, pass it, throw over the truss, pass, score, over and over and over; it got boring after a few matches. This season, I enjoyed watching robots being sometimes challenged to cross the defenses and the rush for the endgame. I also liked the theming, I would enjoy seeing a Stronghold II with the same theme but different objectives in the future.
I agree, fouls were determining match outcomes in 2014, whereas when they did influence the result this year, it was usually a 5-10 point swing and the fouls were largely justified. Too many teams didn’t pay attention to the rules about being protected in the outerworks and leaving before the last 20 seconds.
And 2013 was worse for fouls, on loading discs among others. There were also more red cards in 2013. We were involved in at least 3 incidents in elims in 2013 and our experience wasn’t unique. This year the only one I saw directly was during the Newton final.
The GDC obviously spent a lot of time working on the difficulty curve of Stronghold. The capped-bonus challenges of breaching and capturing meant that lower-tier robots could contribute meaningfully, but higher tier robots couldn’t run away with the points. Matches were often won by just a few points, even when the “strength” was lopsided.
The field looked really impressive from the stands
The defenses added a really tough, new engineering challenge after a few years of drive train stagnation
The secret passage “tagging” rules were pretty cool. Sadly most teams didn’t go into the secret passage much, but I feel like a slight rule change could have made it interesting (not sure how right now)
Bad:
Little meaningful interaction between teams. Except for robots who held doors for eachother (rarely), and the race to the batter, the matches were almost always “6 robots do 6 things”. That gets really boring from a strategic (and spectator) point of view. Instead of looking for interesting new gameplay, you’re watching to see who screws up their part. Contrast that with 2014, where new strategies were still being innovated on Einstein. I fear that this will always be the case as teams pressure the GDC to choose games with lots of game pieces so their performance doesn’t depend on others.
The rules on defense were too onerous. I understand their reasoning, but the result was basically to kill any meaningful defense, and all of the associated game dynamics. When defense was attempted, it usually led to fouls (interfering with a crossing, or not clearing the courtyard in time).
The field was really expensive to build. Take it from a team that built a community practice field.
I would argue there were too many engineering challenges. I personally prefer games with fewer required mechanisms so that we can focus on getting those few working really well, without sacrificing capability. Others will disagree with me though.
Stronghold was an awesome game and engineering challenge! It was easy to show to relatives and friends and was a big hit with them. I think it struck just the right balance of defense to offense. At the end of the day I want to see robots do their thing not be shut down by overwhelming defense but defense could definitely impact a match.
It more than exceeded my expectations. I knew it was going to be a good game from the start, but I didn’t think it would turn out to be one of the best games yet.
Also, I was sure there was going to be a lot more complaining on CD about how many field elements there were to build (I know we had a few choice words we shared with each other), but there seemed to be not too much of that.
In terms of theme, FIRST nailed it this year.
Having all of the field reset crew dubbed “field heralds” and the refs wearing feather hats… it was just a fun event to attend and compete in. Our first district event even had the medieval music going in the pits. 10/10, please partner with Disney again.
I thought from a strategy perspective, Stronghold was a lot more fun than past games. Where in past games match strategy was mostly what each robot on the alliance would do and what to do if opponents started interfering, this year’s addition of selection of defense made match strategy much more intense.
For my team, Stronghold was a great year. We’ve made it further than we ever had. Our engineering, programming and marketing all vastly improved.
Even though things went better for me and my team in Stronghold, I still don’t like it as much as Aerial Assist. Something about Aerial Assist was just more fun and interesting.
Either way, both are better than Recycle Rush.
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