Hey y’all as we rapidly approach the next week of competition, I am curious to know lessons and surprises that teams experienced in the first few weeks. Have any new strategies become prevalent during the first few weeks of competition?
Personally I have been shocked at the large comebacks made in the last few seconds by a well played boost power up and the advantage in climbs. It seems that(in some matches) the scale is so hotly contested that both switches are ignored.
Any insights or strategies for the upcoming week of competition would be fun to discuss:)
I agree. You can really tell when a team isn’t fully aware of what’s going on on the rest of the field, not just their little piece of it. And while the scale can kind of make or break you, it’s defiantly not the only piece of the puzzle.
I’m extremely impressed with some of the awesome autons. I like when a bot picks up a cube after placing the last one so the drivers can start with a loaded cube for teleop. I’ve seen that alone make a win. It’s hard for the opposing team to keep up if their fairly evenly matched.
I was also surprised to see very little defense(bot to bot contact) is this just my observations or have other found this to be the case. To me at first glance it would appear only a few cubes on a scoring element can maintain it if you simply make it difficult for the opposing alliance to quickly place cubes.
Ask 5818 how that worked out in the Los Angeles finals matches.
Defense won’t win matches unless you can outcube them before you start defending. And then, you might as well play the scoring game. And it’s more fun to watch cubes move, IMO
This is definitely not true when it comes to scoring on the Scale after the unprotected Cubes are used up… obviously your alliance needs to be able to cycle efficiently early in the match to keep it close, but playing Portal defense dramatically increases your opponent’s cycle time to the Scale. If they’re not doing the same thing to you then you will outcycle them to the Scale. This is how I see comebacks happening in Power Up.
In Quals 53 at Ryerson we were against 1114 and their lightning fast elevator. We were able to put a cube on the scale in auto and that helped a LOT. With that early lead we were able to maintain ownership of the scale and keep pace with 1114 trying to get it back.
Lesson 1: get the scale early, and it’s easier to keep the scale.
Now, while the two of us were distracted (and entertaining the audience) with the scale battle, their other two robots were quietly taking over both switches.
Lesson 2: it’s not all about the scale.
We lost that match 270-310. However, we failed our climb in the end (did not get hooked in time), and our alliance did not successfully do the switch auto for the points or RP. Had we been successful at the switch auto, and had we made a successful climb, those would have been enough points to win.
Lesson 3: whatever you do, aim to do it consistently and reliably. If you are capable of climbing, aim to make that bulletproof. If you can do a switch auto, make it as consistent and reliable as possible.
Defense is a risky proposition.
At Central New York 358 tried playing hellacious defense in the elims and while they were harassing the high scoring bots on the other alliance they were also accumulating a lot of penalties as well. It is a delicate balancing act that I believe you will see develop more clearly once District and World Championships come around.
Since you asked, yeah that was one of those “that didn’t quite go as planned moments.” We had an all scale alliance that had some defensive capable drivetrains. Our robot was having issues with getting cubes on the high scale (difficulties with differences between practice scale and real scale). That in combination with issues with one of our encoders preventing our scale auto from working, we were up against a 2 to 0 scale deficit from the start. The plan started off fairly well (we get it even 2 to 2, but after one robot got through it fell apart pretty quickly. I would argue that with our resources it was our only shot at winning. For what it’s worth 330 said they were expecting it :eek: they are so next level…