With FIM Champs and Huston Champs coming up will we see the 2 offensive and 1 defensive bot change to all offense? Especially because you didn’t get alot of the 3rd bots from the winning regional this year?
IMO I think we will see teams use their 4th bot as the defense pick and they will only be used in a pinch. I think we’re going to see a 2013 style Meta come back to life in these next 2 weeks.
Interesting thoughts with the lack of the second pick. I didn’t think of that before. It would be amazing to see an all swerve offense team in action.
From watching the PNW DCMP, there was a pretty distinctly negative result whenever a team tried to triple score. It only really works if your opponents don’t hide any balls and they’re all easily accessible. There were some very strong scoring robots available that never got picked, but almost every alliance still opted to have 2 scorers and one defender.
I believe that PNW DCMP is the best indicator of the viability of the triple scoring alliance, as the PNW DCMP elims cut the largest number of teams (~125) to the smallest elimination (24). Every other DCMP either comprises a smaller district or includes more teams in the eliminations.
Having 2 strong scoring robots on one alliance can almost always score virtually all of the available cargo, and especially as we get into Championship Elims, we’ll start seeing the top scores top out and a third scoring robot will just get in the way.
PNW DCMP 2022 was the best event I have seen, both for on-field team performance AND for production quality. Really excellent commentary.
Have a look at the scoring average stats on TBA Insights, for average match score and average winning score, both in quals and playoffs. Alliances took full advantage of all three robots shooting capability and it resulted in many balls scored. When scoring is that fast the cargo doesn’t settle into nooks and crannies as much, because it is getting recycled quickly. I do think this is the next meta.
Let’s all watch and see in Week 7.
I think using a 4th pick for defense makes a lot of sense. But at the same time I still don’t expect much triple offense by the high rank alliances at worlds. After the offensive robots on an alliance get past a certain level, having three of them on the field would cause too much congestion. Teams would be chasing the same balls which would slow down scoring. Either way, excited to see what worlds has in store.
The 4th robot is your sub when one of you breaks because the collisions in high level elims of this game will break everyone. It’s is insanely brutal and is only going to get worse.
Good question … 3 offense only works imo when you have complete domination in terms of shooting ability. I get what your saying with second picks but if your alliance is playing someone better then yours not having a defensive bot will not let you win. I would probably have two best shooters/most maneuverable shoot, while a third one hits the best shooter hard, pins them in areas where they can’t score and grab two of the opposing alliances balls. Ideally your defensive bot is tank though.
Why tank drive and not swerve?
Also welcome to chief.
If you have three solid scorers, what prevents you from playing a “zone” offense? Rather than chasing balls, take care of what comes into your zone. It reduces the cycle time for any ball in terms of “released from hub and scored again” Though, it would increase some cycle times for the bots in more quiet zones. Two fastest shooters on the two halves of the field. Third can rotate back and forth between whichever is busier to pick up the extra and keep things as even as possible for the two scoring bots.
I don’t see why we’d have “chasing” bots if we’re aggressively going after a 3 scoring strategy. You should be picking bots that wouldn’t require chasing because they’re solid scorers. This is especially true if you’re picking first.
Good question!
Our 2022 swerve bot pushes our 2018 Tank bot all over the field. It’s not even close defensively.
Swerve defense terrifies me more than anything else. We have a tank bot and find it very hard to deal with it.
I guess it doesn’t matter as much in champs, but from what I’ve seen the tank bots are able to push around swerve. With a 6 motor or 8 tread wheels vs a standard swerve, then the tank should be able to push it.
Lack of mobility more quickly becomes an issue than the tread you’re looking at. You’re also ignoring that most swerve have 8 motors. The ability to make a spin move around defense (or to match said move) is far more important than a couple of extra motors specifically fueled to the forward/backward of a drive train.
That sounds great in theory but I think having 3 scorers won’t get you much higher scores than having 2 and it will not be as valuable as having a defense bot to slow down the other alliance
Zone offense + zone defense could be a very solid strategy for lower seeded alliances. The high seeds will have the scoring ability to have 2 scorers, but some of the lower ones might benefit from this.
I agree. It’ll be interesting to see what lower seeded alliances strategize and if we’ll ever see a big upset
It’s a similar idea in theory here. You were discussing the top alliances. For those alliances, we can assume they have two of the strongest scorers on the field through themselves and their first pick.
We can also assume they’re picking towards the end of the third round of bots. If defense is a solid strategy, we’re likely already seeing the best defensive bots coming off the board.
This means the top alliance (as an example) has the current reality when they come to pick their final bot(s).
Two of the best scorers on the field (in their estimation, likely the top two). In the early round, they’ll face the ~15th/16th best scorers and the top defense. In the mid round, they’re looking more at the 5th/6th (on average) scorers and the 4th best defense. In the finals, anywhere from the 3rd and 4th scorers to a really good 2nd defensive bot and some scorers (slightly better scoring than their first opponent with slightly worse defense).
You’re making a net value argument here. The two ideas you’re considering are:
In this, you’re deciding the first will have more net value. (The points they prevent would be greater than the points they scored). In this scenario, they have a worse defensive bot than their opponents but also have better scorers than their opponents. If the other alliances are picking defensive bots, this means there’s a solid scoring option remaining in that it’s not a huge dropoff from the 8th alliance’s two shooters given they were the next highest shooter not taken.
In the scenario where the 8th alliance’s defensive bot is amazing at locking down one of your shooters (nearly the best case scenario), picking the third offensive bot puts you into a position where you’re basically down to a 2v2. One of your shooters is one of the top two versus the ~15th best shooter. One of yours is the ~17th best versus the ~16th best.
I’d argue this case is exactly where a third offensive bot shines the most. It essentially cancels out the 2nd bot on the 8th alliance leaving the “top” (might be 2nd on the top alliance) shooters on each to fight it out. This is a winning spot for the top alliance.
In the worst case scenario here, you’re looking at the 1v2 where you’re not having such a huge gap and the lower picked shooter is likely to struggle 1v1 versus one of the 2nd alliance’s shooters. But, you’re also looking at a defensive bot that’s not as likely to lock down either of the top two shooters meaning you’re looking at whether or not the third bot can clean up behind the bot taking defense to keep the output up. If so, they have a better score.
A defensive bot on top alliances sounds great in theory. But, I don’t see it getting much lower scores for the opposing alliance when it matters most given the talent that would have been selected ahead of them.
So I definitely see multiple strategies coming into potential play. Here are the 3 main ones I see potentially popping up:
1.5 is something that was employed to great effect at Chesapeake District Champs this previous weekend by the #7 seed 122, 1610, and 5804. The strategy is that you take the lead during auto, then run double defenders on the heaviest scorers on the opposing alliance, 1 solely defense, and 1 flex. The 3rd member is continuing to score to maintain the lead, but if the opposing alliance gets close to overtaking, then the flex returns to shooting to score points. The objective of this strategy is to keep them at a distance to where you keep the lead and then endgame would seal the deal by keeping the distance so that no matter what endgame they had, they would be ahead by enough. It got the #7 seed through the #2 seed and the #3 Seed, and almost worked against the #1 seed of 836 and 2363, but they just missed out. It’ll be interesting to see if teams will try to employ that against teams with higher teleop ceilings.
So I was watching several events this weekend. By far, the most entertaining and the highest scoring District Championship was Pacific Northwest. So many Cargo Bonus RPs, so many 100+ qual scores.
I compiled this little table, as an attempt to understand why PNW was putting up so many more big scores. Two theories: (1) better shooters because PNW DCMP is more selective, inviting a smaller fraction of their total number of teams in the district to DCMP, and (2) for whatever reason, PNW teams play less defense, concentrating on offense. The second theory doesn’t hold up based on my anecdotal observation of a lot of chasing, pushing and shoving. But I wasn’t watching all of the events, so defense could have been more aggressive elsewhere. I did include average foul points in the comparison table, but I don’t think that stat correlates well with defense as a qual match tactic, because district teams tend to get better at playing clean D by this point in the season.
Thoughts on what could be behind the differences illustrated below? What do you expect to see at Michigan, Ontario, and Indiana DCMPs next week?
Maybe significant, maybe not: Michigan invites about 35% of district teams to DCMP, while Indiana invites about 62%. Ontario is having an unusual year; I heard they are inviting ALL teams to DCMP.
I’ll echo your conclusion that the 2nd theory doesn’t hold up after being at the event. There was a lot of defense being played throughout the weekend and things definitely shifted from match to match.
I definitely the exclusivity (for the lack of a better word) of the event as well as a large number of strong cargo shooters played a role in the high scoring. I don’t know the other regions but PNW had a lot of incredibly solid offensive teams this year such that teams who led alliances to finals at their districts were left on the sidelines Saturday afternoon. Potentially that might account for the scores at the event?
Also a small nit, there were 50 teams competing with their robot at the event. Two teams (949 and 4061) are present on the final event list because individuals from their team won awards (WFFA and Dean’s List respectively) but they were not in attendance.
