I went to the NJ Regional on 3/6/04 with a few people from my team just to do some scouting. The one thing I really noticed was that there were a lot of very good ball-cappers (I think 303 and 195 were the best, could be getting team #'s confused though). Our team sort of discarded ball-capping at the beginning because we thought the small balls and hanging were more important. But there were a few matches where capping played a HUGE role and most of the alliances that went deep into the playoffs had at least one capping robot.
Has anyone seen anything like this at any other regionals (if there have been any others yet) and if you have, what do you think of it?
In the first day at the Manchester, NH regional, ball capping made a difference in a lot of matches. But on the second day, it seemed like the team who could cap well would often just be pushed around until it was too late to do anything.
I was actually surprised that the balls didn’t play a more significant role in the finals. I had expected to see really high scores, dominated by ball scoopers, but hanging from the bar seemed to actually determine the outcome of many of the final matches.
from the webcast it seemed that capping only made a differance if you had a lot of balls in the goals and a lot of robots were somewhat inefficient at herding balls.
At NJ, 303 showed that if your robot was good at getting balls to the human player and capping, you could beat hanging robots “easily” (with a good HP). They beat us fair and square in QF 1.2 by getting balls in the movable and fixed goals and capping them. I think they scored over 80 pts with balls regularly throughout the competition.
I think capping is very important. Thats how we won most of our matches. If both human players make all 3 balls in at the beginning of the round and thats capped thats 60 points which is more than 1 robot hanging. Feed a few more balls to the human player and cap it and u can easily beat 2 hanging bots.
Capping is important only if your alliance can score balls–and that means that at least one of the robots must be able to efficiently collect and deliver balls and your human players must be good.
If one team can cap and one team can score balls, than you’re very well off. Re: Us and Hyper allianced in practice on Thursday scoring over 200 points this way.
First off…you save a couple of small balls so that you can knock your opponents 2X multiplier off their stationary goal with a baseball throw. I’ve done it several times in practice–it just takes some skill and a lot of luck.
Second off…you try to get your robot–or your partners robot–to hang/cap/block the bar/ whatever to the best of its ability.
ok well. im from team 303 and we dont have anything to do with hanging. what we do best is capping. you can totally offset the score of a hanging robot by only having 5 balls and a cap. or something like that. in finals we caped twice with balls in each. capping is deffinatly worth it. but what makes a alliance strong is one bot that hangs and one that stays on the ground, a ball handler.
I’ve noticed the topic of capping the opponents goal before balls are scored (or when there are only a couple) hasn’t been mentioned as a defensive strategy.
Is this because it doesn’t work, as it can typcially be uncapped so easy, or just something not too many teams tried to do in the first regionals?
Capping proved to be very effective to those who could do it consistently. I think the reason we won was because of a great alliance. Each bot complimenting the other. Especially 237 and us. They hung and blocked the bar and we just went around gathering balls then capping both goals. Our alliance lost once throughout the eliminations against the 8th seed (probably the 2nd best alliance with 25, 365, and 103). Ball handlers and hangers make a good combo.
SHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! I will be the first to say that if it can be done, this is an excelent strategy, keeping in mind a couple things…
If you put the ball too far in, any ball on top of that are multiplied, even is you get 5 or 6 in thats still decent points. If the ball is gently placed on top, the hp’s might have some devine strength and be able to knock the ball out (though with the PVC in back that might be hard).
This strategy works very well against an alliance who hads no 2x ball capibilities, however some teams that can hang, might be able to uncap the ball as well.
actually, I dont know how the other regionals are working, but at the drivers meeting of the Nj regional they announced that any balls on top of the yellow ball arent considered points at all according to revision C of the rules (which dont include the Q&A forum). Any backup on this from other regionals?
Question was asked at the driver’s meeting on Thursday at New Jersey regional. They specifically said that balls on top of the 2x would count as nothing. So that strategy would not work.
