Lunacy Review

FIRST General Forum
#45

It was not just Thunderchickens and Wildstang that used auton to their advantage.

HOT and Truck Town also would prefer to load up our robots in auton. Even 971 was attempting to get to the human player station to get additional balls.

The placement of the robots on the field at the start was not by accident. Our alliance knew that 217 and 68 would be very dangerous if they both started with 20 balls, then trapped 971 in the middle of the field for a 40 ball dump into their trailer (ala the Einstien SF2).

Although both 67 and 111 would prefer to load in auton, I was confident that we could get balls off the floor quickly and disrupt 68 and 217 if we both attempted to block them from loading. Worst case in my mind was that we all loaded in auton, then it would come down to who could pin and dump better.

In F1 67 stopped 68, but 217 avoided 111 and both loaded in auton. In F2 67 kinda stopped 68 and loaded, while both 217 and 111 loaded.

We had many auton modes (12) that could be run anytime, but we never had to use them b/c very few teams tried to stop us from loading +6 balls into our robot before the clock started.

I think it gave us a strategic advatage and pushed our scoring average from ~17 balls/match to +23 balls/match.

I was surprised by how many teams only tried to avoid getting scored on in auton, even at the championships.

#46

Likes:

The floor/wheels: It allowed teams to be effective with a simple drive system. But it also allowed teams to experiment. I know that our team as able to pull off something that we most likely couldn’t have on carpet. With this floor, it allowed teams to be successful with low torque drive systems. Even to the point of having just one CIM powering the entire drive. It also allowed teams to try holonomic, and really helped me learn some physics. ex: Static/Dynamic Friction

The trailers: Moving goals created a nice challenge for every team.

Programming: A good traction control system was something unique and relatively cool.

Cons:

Human players starting with balls: I would have preferred to have the moon rocks start on the game field. Then some robots could have specialized in refueling of human players.

Bumper Rules: Rules should be crystal clear before kickoff.

Field problems: We had a few matches where our robot would disconnect/crash/or otherwise stop responding for reasons that we couldn’t figure out. On the field we wouldn’t respond, once we got back to the pit and tethered. We would have full responsiveness. Nothing changed except the field.

Overall I liked the game, however I think that HP influence was too great.

#47

Ok, I’ll bite.

Pluses
+Different drive surface, showed students that some challenges are radically different

  • Trailers, robot to robot interaction is something we all wanted, here it was
  • Lots of game pieces, one of my complaints about 2008 was the lack of game pieces for teams to use
  • Uniquely shaped game piece, for all its flaws the balls were pretty unique and it made people think of new ways of handling them
    +Scoring/reffing was easy, a ball that had orange on it was worth 2 points regardless of whether it was scored while the planets were in alignment or if it was a full moon and penalties were pretty clear cut.

Deltas
^ Bumpers, I strongly disagree with bumpers, build a robot capable of withstanding a beating or expect it to be broken
^ Game pieces, flimsy and hard to find, plus some of us struggled to tell moon rocks and empty cells apart
^ Flooring, yeah it was cool, it was fun, lets not do it again. It was messy, it was expensive, and it was just generally a pain. Also, I cant imagine staring at it all day was very much fun
^ Single supplier for wheels, I love AndyMark to death but I cannot STAND to have to buy parts from one supplier, just a pet peeve of mine.
^ Inspections, not sure if this was a Michigan only problem or not but I know that a team could pass inspection at an event and then, without changes, not pass inspection at the next.
^ Player Stations, do I need to explain this? They shorted, they fried, they were just generally not fun. New technology, surely this will get fixed
^ Pile Ups, I didnt like it last year and I still dont like it, I cant understand why people like watching robots get piled up. More times than I can count I saw some team get pinned then the pinning team get pinned. Sooner or later 5 robots were pinned in a corner none of them getting out. I dont like this.
^ G14, Im not explaining this, find some of my other posts on this topic or PM me if you really dont understand why I disagree with it.

Overall I was a pleased with the game, Im not generally a fan of refrigerator games (2006/2009 etc) but this one managed to ALMOST hold my attention. Notice the almost, I hated watching this game. Building for it was fun though.

Ranking the games I have competed in (2004-Present)

  1. 2004 - Hanging was fun
  2. 2008 - Fast paced
  3. 2006 - My first game for shooting things
  4. 2007 - Ramps were fun but it was way too heavy defense
  5. 2009 - See above
  6. 2005 - Just didn’t like the game
#48

Not just a Michigan problem.

We passed inspection fine in Midwest, then had to add more structural backing to our bumpers at Wisconsin.

#49

I really disliked several things about Lunacy.

-G14. Need I say more. Please let this be only this year. I can understand the idea behind it, but it really doesn’t seem logical to penalize people for doing well.

-The surface/wheels. Though it made sense to the theme, it still made the game annoyingly slow and created less variety among the bots. Overdrive had lots of variety, but this year was meh.

-If even one bot was pinned, you could stick a fork in your alliance, becasue your match is over. You lost. I watched all of the Newton division (except finals), the Curie finals, and Einstein, and it seemed that once a bot was pinned, their alliance probably lost.

-Too much human player involvement. I know this echoes pretty much every other post, but still…If a human player outscores a robot, then they have too much influence on the game.

I can’t really find much good to say about Lunacy.

My personal preference of games since my beginning of FRC…

2008
2007
2009

#50

Okay at this point I’m becoming a Lunacy apologist.

I’m not a fan of G14, but FIRST didn’t just suddenly start punishing extreme wins. Look at the Ranking Points system in general.

It really sucks to be absolutely blown away by a team. I don’t agree that the rule should be implemented, but I can see the point of it.

Clever engineering solves this problem. Look at stuff like the Thunderchicken’s shooter, teams with crab drives to escape pins more easily, or general rotating turret designs. Being pinned was the primary reason I supported a turreted robot, and it paid off: In one match our robot made 10 moon rocks while pinned!

#51

Ranking points are based on your opponents score, not their score in comparison to yours. So before winning by fifty points and winning by a hundred points made no difference. It was all about how well the opponents scored. I was under the impression that this was not designed to prevent blow-outs but rather designed to take into account the randomness of qualification rounds. So if your team beats 1114, 217, and 67 you are likely going to get more ranking points then playing against three robots that can’t score, or two robots and a no show. It’s to help prevent a team from riding to the top purely based on lucky matches.

#52

And I’m probably the guy who made you add it… and you were not the only team that had to do so…

We (the Regional Lead Inspectors) try very hard to make the inspections uniform from event to event. I know I hate the “but it passed at xxxxx” discussion as much as anyone. However, sometimes things slip by, especially if your first inspection was done by a new inspector, or if you didn’t get inspected until Friday morning, etc. I always see little things on Saturday during the re-weigh that should not have passed. At that point, I try to point them out in case the team is going to another event, but unless it is something that gives a competitive advantage or is a safety issue, it’s hard to ask the team to go change it before the elims.

Back to the topic of the thread: my biggest complaint about this year was the fact that the only thing that identified the alliance color was the trailer bumpers. I watched a lot of matches this year, both at regionals and Atlanta, and for all of them I was at field level. It was just about impossible to keep track of the colors unless you were right at the edge of the field. I don’t know how the people sitting in the outpost stations did it. I really don’t want to go back to the flags for various reasons, including the tendancy for them to go shooting off in various directions. However, I do wish the grey pipe in the center of the trailer had been painted with the alliance color. Also, as others have noted, with the robots and trailers there was a lot of equipment on the field, and it tended to all get bunched together. It was a lot like watching grade school soccer, where you can tell where the ball is because all the kids are in one pack around it. That’s how a lot of the matches I watched seemed. Everyone was all in one big clump somewhere on the field.

As a mentor for a rookie team with essentially no funding this year, I loved the field surface. It was nice for once to know that they would be at least able to drive as well as everyone else without having to spend time and money we did not have trying to come up with some super-duper drivetrain. And the simple drivetrain meant that they got the robot done in time for the programmers to actually have some time with the new control system.

#53

Likes:

  • Different game surface switched things up a bit
  • Less penalties. After last year, this was a huge breath of fresh air
  • Game pieces looked interesting
  • Lots of game pieces (I think its more exciting than just a few big ones)

Dislikes:

  • Different game surface was expensive to purchase
  • The field was very cluttered
  • Hard to tell who was winning
  • Human players mattered a bit too much
  • Completely rule-specified robot::floor interaction made it less likely for students to learn quite as much about designing drive systems (to be fair, you could go through the same analysis, but it was hard to justify doing so)
  • Game piece was not readily available outside the US
  • Long-term pinning stunk
  • G14 struck me as a really weird and unnecessary rule

I have a hard time forming an opinion on the excitement factor for Lunacy. While it was great to see 1114/217/67/111/2056/68/etc. running around with a full load trying to catch an opponent, it was also really boring to see those same robots pinned in the corner or stuck in a traffic jam.

My rankings of games I was on a team for:
2006 (best)
2007
2008
2005 (I have a love/hate relationship with this one. As a rookie, I was mostly a spectator, and it was pretty dull and repetitive to watch; however, I would love to have been a drive coach for it)
2009 (worst)

#54

People have been quick and brutal in complaining about <G14>. This shows that it is NOT a penalty, NOT a way to punish teams for doing “too well,” it’s merely another way to incorporate different strategies into the game and push people beyond their comfort zones (it accomplished that last one very well!).

So I say to the GDC: Kudos for <G14>, thank you for the challenge, thank you for sticking with it in the face of severe backlash, and thanks for not doing it again next year.

(I expect CAGE Match will do away with <G14> - not for any philosophical reasons, but simply to make the event more streamlined and accessible.)

#55

I have said it before and I will say it again. When a robot can’t function for whatever reason, a human should be allowed to score so that the team doesn’t become disenchanted. I also believe that any game where the human player can swing the score or make a fateful last ditch attempt and score makes for an exciting game. I didn’t like 2003 for that reason, humans had no effect even though they tried like mad.

#56

I’m missing the logic. Because people hated it it couldn’t possibly be a penalty? It’s a good rule because people hated it? And you are certainly correct that it pushed people out of their comfort zones. FIRST isn’t all about the robots, but what happens on the field is still a competition. Being worried about doing too well in a competition is absolutely ridiculous. All teams should always put their %100 into a match, and shouldn’t be penalized for doing so. Being penalized for having a good robot is out of my comfort zone.

#57

I was thinking more from a defensive position. If you look at pure offense it seems fine, but considering how important D is this year (and many other years!) shutting down your opponent was bad.

I think FIRST tries to make rules people dislike so that you learn to deal with them. <G14> is a strategic element of the game, regardless of whether or not people think that they deserve a “penalty free win”, so you have to play around it (or just not care about it; G14 has never impacted a match I’ve played when it was active)

#58

Yes, but it is a spectrum: a good human player can swing a match if they are 25% as effective as a good robot too. I think Aim High had it right. If you had a bad robot, your human player could still make long shots for 1pt each, or reload an ally, or something like that. With Lunacy, a human player could be 100% as effective as a good robot.

One of the best suggestions I’ve heard came from one of our mentors: HPs should have had unrestricted scoring during autonomous, but then during TeleOp, could only pass balls through the airlock.

#59

ditto! :slight_smile:

Best game ever - 1999
Some human player interaction, but it was callenging and it had an excellent end game.

Worst game ever - 2001
To anyone complaining about this game being boring, look up 2001 - Copertition FIRST

(I feel old)

#60

Likes
-A lot more strategy within an alliance. (You had to decide who would be playing defense, scoring, delivering empty cells, etc.)
-Less Penalties!!!
-A lot more game pieces, allowed everyone to have a chance to use them.
-Targets in games were always moving so it was more of a challenge to score
-3 targets for each alliance
-Different surface made it more interesting
-Had more of a theme to it
-More interesting to scout
-Drivers needed a lot more skill

Dislikes
-Human Player could change the outcome of the game way too much!
-The surface was expensive to buy and annoying to set up every meeting.
-Sometimes very boring to watch when all robots were pinned in a corner.
-G14 was horrible
-Game pieces were really annoying to find.
-There weren’t many unique ideas for robot manipulator. A lot of robots looked the same
-Inspections were always different. We were fine with our motors and everything until Atlanta. (Keep inspections constant)
-If a robot was missing or dead, it almost always ended in that alliance losing due to the open trailer
-The scoring during the game was almost always inaccurate. There were times when it said we were lost by almost 20 at the end of the game and then when the final score came out we won, and vice versa

#61

Do you know how many times I told my team this and how many times they didn’t listen and when they finally began to work on it Thursaday at Nats, nothing was able to be accomplished. I even was thinking that matches were won or lost in auto. O well hopefully next year.

#62

The game had several good things going for it this year:
The new surface made veterans re-think their drive systems and in our case we built something we never otherwise would have and now have opened some doors for where we might go in the future.
The decrease in power needed to drive also had us focus on different types of mechanisms than we usually build because we had far more motor to run them.
The opponent controlled goal was novel and showed us the way to add some variation to the game that made for more excitement.
The human player scoring was something I liked because it made it so that there was nowhere on the field to hide and you had to be mobile at all times.
Lack of penalties are always good, as they say in sports, the refs could “let us play.”
The supercell was a good “big ending” bonus and the weight of it was appropriate to scoring verses some other years.
The game piece was great because it was different than any other type of ball we used in the past and the plentiful quantity of them was great as well.

My main complaint is the game didn’t pass the parent/grandparent/person off the street test, meaning it was too hard to follow if you weren’t a FIRSTer already. If we want to grow and get noticed we need to be able to quickly explain the game and who is leading should be easier to tell.
Red and blue bumpers should have been banned to make telling alliances apart better.
If the field was bigger I think it would have allowed more movement making the game more exciting, but I doubt this works in all venues.

My other complaint is we were forced to play the game the GDC’s way. I like being able to creatively solve the problem/game, but the last couple years our choices have been limited more and more so you see fewer why didn’t I think of that robots and most of the game breaking stratagies are thought out in game design and removed through rules.

#63

Even though this my second year of competition, I have to say that this is by far my best year.
A lot of people said the things I liked this year,
but here’s a couple I wanted to say:

A lot of people complained about how the HP had too much of an effect on the game’s outcome therefore veteran teams with superbly built bots had to compete with rookie teams that had an “ok” robot that could just drive around while they used their HP to score.
I thought that this was good because then rookie teams could compete on par with teams that have been doing this for a long time.

Another thing I noticed was about how rebuilding a practice field because of the flooring was costly and that’s why the field should just be carpet.
True it does cost money, but isnt the whole purpose of FIRST to inspire engineering and to tackle any challenges caused by the game?

Basically, I enjoyed this year’s game because it wasn’t just a game. It had real life applications such as robots and humans interacting to get a job done.
It simulated what it would be like driving on the moon as well as celelbrated how far we’ve come/advances we’ve made since then…

but that’s just my opinion.

theres prolly a whole list of real life applications that this year’s game had.
and maybe too in previous years.

#64

i like the fact that FIRST tried to level out the playing field with this game though. in our rookie season the game was overdrive, in that game it seemed like you needed to have some sort of idea of the scale of FIRST. Plus we had no real building mentors >.<