My team is really debating on focusing on either defense or offense?
Is your team focusing on one or another? Or both?
Are you focusing on going over the bumps/under the tunnel?
Or staying in your section of the field?
Pros/cons for offense vs defense?
“From a certain perspective, defense and offense encompass nearly identical tactics.”
–Kavier Harkonnen
-Address to Salusan Military
this is from an amazing book: The Butlerian Jihad (part of the Dune series)
As noted above some actions are both offensive and defensive. In the middle, by moving the balls to your offensive zone, you are fueling an offense, but also denying them to the opponent, thus said action is both. Also, the act of pinning can be used for both (stopping someone from pushing a ball in or keeping them out of the way of a shot).
As for offense/defense in general? It depends on your thinking. Obviously if your alliance can’t score, you can’t win, which would suggest offense. However, on the flipside, if the opposing alliance can’t score, it can’t win, suggesting defense.
The one thing that I’ll say is that a lot of the time, defense gets overlooked. It has no really measurable characteristics. Sure you can count how many blocks it makes, but how much value does an action like pinning add? Because you’re looking for the absence of opposing scoring it’s hard to quantify defense.
Offense is much easier to measure since it is just “how many points can they score.” This will probably get more attention from teams, but likewise, many teams will be doing it, and to stand out, you will have to be quite good (although this is true in any case).
As an example, in the 2008 game, Overdrive, I was wondering the entire Championship (and even before that) why some teams didn’t play just to “harrass” (play defense) because they couldn’t hurdle. I think it was certain penalties to be avoided, but in the end, it could make a huge difference (if you’re familiar with the game, if I were to punch your trackball back over the line after you crossed, you had to go around once and take it back around before you could get points for it again). Almost every alliance picked based on points scored, which ignored that there were only two game pieces for each alliance to score with. At the end when I was getting on the bus, a group was walking by talking about how they should have picked a lap bot that could run and annoy the other team.
Defense is great, but often doesn’t get the attention it deserves (although by the nature of this game, it very well might).
My team chose offense, for two reasons:
If you are defence, try preparing for defense and midfield so if you get paired with another defense robot, then you can be flexible. For this reason you should be able to go over the humps as this gives you even more flexibility.
In seeding rounds this thrown out though, so defense in and of itself isn’t bad, its just that in the seeding rounds it can be (although if it keeps your from losing in a round then that’s actually better).
Everyone thought playing defense in Rack n’ Roll was a silly notion. Once robots started playing defense, it became clear that it was the only key to win.
My suggestion: Play offense, but always defend.
Defense wins championships. Unless the year is 2005, 2008, or 2009.
I think the best offensive strategies in this game, and the best offensive robots, will play a strategy one might label as “defensive”. There are key points in the game where defense is needed to augment offense, and if you don’t succeed at them, you won’t succeed on the field. This game is going to play out a LOT like Rack n’ Roll, with a few less dual lifters.
My two cents.
Depends on what you’re defending. Opponents’ goals? Opponents’ robots? Opponents’ possessed balls? Opponents’ passed/shot balls?
Adaptability will be king in this game. If your robot has design(s) that are adaptable to many uses, success will follow.
At any rate, “offense” and “defense” are much too vague to be employed as strategies.
I apologize for the obvious contradiction in my post. I meant elimination rounds for the first one.
Chris, IIRC, defense was still a contributing factor in 2008. I don’t remember seeing 148 do much (on Einstein) besides knock the trackball away from the opposing alliance. If somebody on 148 would like to correct me, but my memory has it that they didn’t do much lap running during teleoperated mode, but rather did things like put the trackball back across the line
In the years I cited, I meant that an alliance with more offense would almost always win over defense. In 2008, two good hurdlers would beat one good hurdler and two defenders. 2009, three scorers beat two scorers and a scorer-defensive (see Einstein Finals). Other games, the alliance that incorporated defense best into an offensive strategy often prevailed. (Of course, a lot of this is based off of TBA videos / YouTube / Google)
The thing is that in 2008, only two teams were capable of scoring the big points. Barring breakdowns, two hurdlers and a good defender would beat three 3 hurdlers because only two could hurdle at a time. At that point, my point was that the defender was usually better. I’d have to go back to my scouting data, but if I pushed the ball back over the line (and no g22), even twice in a match, it would have a greater impact than a third offensive bot.
Defense is important when used as part of a thoughtful offensive strategy. Defense can and does win matches and tournaments, but a purely defensive robot gets picked into a winning alliance less often than robots that have excellent scoring capabilities combined with the ability to play “heavy D”.
100% Correct! Whether you are a defensive or offensive robot, if you only have the ability to do one or two things well, teams will come up with a strategy to succeed against you.
The second statement is far more important to this whole thread. Neither offense or defense wins matches and tournaments… Strategy wins matches and tournaments! 
In the Qualification Rounds …
Thus, a team who’s offensive capability is mediocre compared to its defensive capability should focus solely on offense during qualifications and save the defense for eliminations. Ergo designing explicitly for defense implies that you expect your robot’s capabilities will be attractive enough to a high-ranked team to be picked; the reality is that those alliance selections are quite unpredictable, especially early in the build season.
Edit – that does not mean robots should stay away from mid-field defense during quals, since your 'bot jockeys for position in order to feed balls from one side to the other… in elims mid-field will be key since it is only there that balls return back to your offense after being scored. During quals it will simply be more important to keep the flow of balls moving than it will be to push the other robots around.
there is also the “Helper bot” option where you focus on helping your alliance climb the tower
I think it comes down to how you want to play the game. Do you want a robot that rocks in qualifications but not in elims? remember that win/loss doesn’t matter this year until the elims.
So I like to take the strategy of Beatty (71) back in 2002. We don’t care where we rank after quals, we know that we will get picked and will win with the strategy we picked to play.
In elims defense is going to be a huge part of the game, letting the other team score doesn’t matter anymore just winning. So if you have the best defensive robot and can shut anyone down, you will get noticed and you will get picked, or even with the seeding points this year you could still have a chance to be a picker.
If two alliances are equal in skill and ability, then there isn’t a chokehold strategy this year. It’s too dynamic of a game to guarantee victory for one side. There are things you can do to put it in your favor, yet it with the good strategists it simply turns into a game of cat and mouse at that point.
Yes i realize there is no choke-hold strategy this year, however if you always take the approach to try and design a robot that is incapable of being beaten in elims, you will be a step ahead of everyone else.
I think whether on offense or defense pushing power will be big this year, it should be a very physical game, much like Rack and Roll was. If you can outpush your opponents you can score and keep them from scoring. A lot of teams are talking about mechanum wheels - we used them in 2008, they are great for manuverability but you can get pushed around very easily.
IMO, Defense is something you play - not something that you necessarily design a robot for.
Arguably, any robot with a robust and powerful drive train can play effective defense this year. I’d say if you were going to build a robot with the intentions of playing defense, I’d at least incorporate some sort of basic, even primitive scoring mechanism so that should the need arise, you can score.
This opinion is based on my experiences in 2009, when we built a very very capable offensive robot, just ask anyone who saw it in action, but we were know to play devastating defense at times.