Team Update 19 is out, and although matches haven’t started yet, the Israel District Championship is underway. And correct me if I’m wrong, but we haven’t heard a peep from FIRST about whether they will change the number of prepopulated gears or pressure thresholds for DCMPs. I was running under the assumption that these changes would be implemented at either all of the DCMPs or none of the DCMPs, since this is how it worked last year.
Since Israel is one of the strongest districts and is starting right now, it seems there is a strong indication that the number of prepopulated gears and the pressure threshold will not change for DCMPs.
For some districts, this could be a relief. There really haven’t been that many 4 rotor matches in GA or NC, for instance. For a district like PNW, however, I can imagine 4 rotors will happen all the dang time in quals and playoffs at the district championship.
How will this affect strategy at your DCMP? Please share your thoughts.
It’s okay. The main point of this thread is to assess what the effect of this non-change will be on DCMPs. For instance, many DCMPs will have >24 teams that can deliver 1 gear in auto and 3-5 gears in teleop. This will make 4 rotors easy for every alliance. Will 4 rotors be the new 3 rotors? How will fuel play into this? How many alliances will go for the 20 point bonus for getting to 40 kPa? Is it worth putting your best robot on teleop fuel knowing that it will be easy for the other alliance to get 4 rotors? What the top district fuelbots such as 33, 125, 195, 1114, 1574, 1690, and 2056 do the majority of the time in their playoff matches?
4 rotors will still be very rare due to the fact that defense will become huge.
If you have 2 robots that can reliably do 3 rotors, then you decide do you want a 3rd gear robot to try for 4 rotors or do you get a defense bot to prevent the other teams from scoring gears.
I think that Israel will end up being reflected by the larger districts that have lots of top teams that can gear well, but the smaller districts will still stick to 3 gear bots.
In playoffs, I’ve seen a good amount of fuel defense, even to the point of taking tech fouls to do it. Whether or not taking the tech foul is effective (in this particular instance, it was) is obviously very situational, but there’s a good amount of clean defense that can be done in the key as well. I’d expect to see even more as we go into DCMP and Champs.