A discussion on my team recently arose about pre-comp scouting and its uses. I was wondering how teams typically value it. How does your team use it?
For us, we really only use pre scouting to understand the spread of effective robots and for our first qualifying match. If we know a team historically builds effective scoring robots, we are probably going to plant a defense bot on them even though we have no real idea on how good they are this year. Better safe than sorry. Practice matches also factor into pre scouting for us. After the first match though, we go by scouting data.
It’s something to do if you have the time and want to get a head start. It’s only really viable for later events. It doesn’t really replace scouting and the data should basically be thrown out once you have real at event data, but it can help you gauge the depth of the event and the key teams to watch.
Prescouting is good for figuring out how to strategize for the first couple matches when scouting data for that event is scarce. In addition, teams often play different roles in playoff matches than quals, so prescouting some playoff matches helps identify the full breadth of a robot’s ability. For example, many teams in 2016 played defense in elims after playing strictly offense in quals.
In addition, prescouting can be invaluable for preparing for District Championship/Championship events. With Champs in particular, with the schedule being released well in advance, strategy for every qualification match can be thought about before even arriving at the event.
Pre-Comp scouting is also a great way of training drive teams. It allows drivers to understand the flow of a match and what possible obscure events could occur. You could teach drivers what to avoid in a match. In addition, if something goes wrong for a team in the match the drive team can learn how they should react when those problems occur to their robot.
Finally, Pre-Comp Scouting allows teams to test their scouting system. Since the scouting systems are usually designed before any matches have been played they don’t function that well in the beginning. By watching pre-comp matches you can test and improve the scouting system.
One thing but mentioned yet, and probably far from normal, is scouting previous season awards. Not for their relevance to this season, but because it gives or students an idea of who to talk to right off the bat for advice on winning certain awards. Like 1108 having 8 RCAs and 1710 having 6 - they’re local teams I will be sending or Chairman’s presenters over to pick their brains on what makes their teams tick.
Our strategy team this year found about 60 previous season performance metrics for each team at GDC and Central Maraland. We then looked on the internet (CD, YouTube, Facebook and twitter) to find out what most team’s drive trains, mechanisms, and other aspects look like to get a good idea of what we will be competing against at each competition. (This is specifically useful for our week 2 event because only 6 of 40 teams will have competed week 1)
Knowing each team’s historical strengths and weaknesses, general strategy as assumed by pictures of their bot, and the distribution of mechanical features at the competition is useful for a good number of reasons. It is, however, not nearly as important as at competition scouting.
For our week 4 competition, we will try to watch at least 5 previous matches for each team, and all of the matches the higher end teams have played to get a good sense of what these teams are capable of accomplishing before we see them at the competition. This will be much more useful then the historical information we have gathered.
Also I am going to try to make the trip out to North VA (week 1) and North MD (week 3) to talk to teams for pre-scouting purposes.
This will all mostly help with the pre-match scouting reports for early matches when we don’t have much scouting data other than pit scouting which is also marginally useful.
We haven’t done anything to this extent in previous years, so I will be able to say if it was worth it at the end of the season.
We have an interesting story about being on the other end of pre-comp scouting:
2014 was our rookie year, and we started at Waterloo (with 254, 2056, 1114, it was crazy). We did way better than we expected, and ended up seeding 5th, and got knocked out in the semis by 254, 2056, and 865.
We go to our next event (Windsor), and we run into some major issues with FMS/code (we still aren’t sure to this day). Anyways, we fixed the issues Saturday morning, but it was too late. We seeded 37th out of 40 teams. We were going home.
Except we didn’t. 4525 asked us about our issues, and decided to pick us as their first selection on the 5th alliance. We were shocked, but glad that they had seen us at Waterloo and knew we could perform much better than we had.
Our alliance did great - we got to the semis, and took the 1114, 2056, and 5288 alliance to the 3rd game and lost it by <20 points. Pre-scouting worked out great for us, and I think 4525 would say they were happy they took it into account.