I don’t think it is quite that flat this year. I’d break the tasks out a little bit more. There are a couple that I think are significantly easier than others.
2 Likes
Okay but actually speaking, as a former human player in 2024, the amount of faith that people suddenly have in human players in high pressure situations is astounding. Most human players are too busy watching their own robot and are barely aware of the surrounding area. 2024 was way easier than this year in regards to timing, why didn’t everyone train it out?
If a team specializes in corral, why choose to risk adding reaction time and wait to your cycles when your cycles are so short and every second hurts? I’d rather do less levels and skip climb just to score more pieces.
On the other hand, this game has revealed how many people don’t do their homework in regards to FRC study. It’ll be a fun game to watch.
Source defense plays similar to 2019 rocket defense, 2023 double substation behaves like an elevated floor pickup, and in regards to game piece dynamics, this is the first game I’ve seen people give up this early on a basic robot concept without any good justified reason.
Here’s a fun tip from someone who tried to index tipped cones, tipped cones aren’t difficult to index because of their shape but because of their softness. They behave similarly to 2020 power cells. Yet people still did 2020 power cell indexing and intaking. (And it took 4 weeks to figure out). Hard game pieces historically are much easier tend to be predictable.
That being said, this game lends itself to specialization for most teams. I’m a fan of doing the least you can for the most points, and I think violating one of the most common rules in FRC (ground intake full width) will be pain to the point where I don’t think climbing or fancy things with the algae or worth it.
My favorite advice for this game is do a frequency analysis on game actions instead of a time/points analysis, you’ll find some interesting conclusions for this game.
15 Likes
Any advice on how to take the Fourier Transform of my team’s strategy?
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I also advocate for a ground intake for coral.
- Coral station is not protected.
- There are more than enough coral that you can use it defensively (flood the field).
- (I haven’t tested this yet) If the HP full sends the coral down the chute, it covers some distance and cuts down on cycle time.
- I don’t know about horizontal orientation, or if spinning the coral helps.
I do however, believe RustHOUNDS Ri3D’s coral funnel is good enough for lower level teams.
Not really a disagreement but more of a nuance. Coral L1 is only the easiest task if you build your architecture around that task. Otherwise it requires either added mechanical complexity, or extra time and care in placement, or just luck that it doesn’t fall off.
6 Likes
Apply white noise to it, and see what you get out. Take the cross power spectral density between the output and input to get the frequency response, and then cry because because your system has too many zeros. Realize that your robot need more poles…
1 Like
I wouldn’t say “most”… but yes. Training and practice time goes a long way towards solving this, but even if your player is perfect your partners may be… questionable. I painfully remember some matches back in Steamworks that were lost by a human player standing there oblivious as half the audience screamed at them to get the gear!
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Or lower the rope.
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Or the whole audience screamed at them to finish turning the correct crank 
There’s a lot of potential for feels-bad.jpg human player moments in this game 
5 Likes
The processor is a red herring, coopertition is a red herring
The more I think about it, there is no good strategy that involves the processor
First, lets talk about point values. Face value, the processor is 6 points. But you are handing the algae to the opponents human player. From what I’ve seen, human players will have 90% throw accuracy. It is a ridiculously easy shot. So that 6 points gets reduced by 4 points every time they make it. That is, reduced by 3.6 points on average. Processor scoring isn’t worth 6 points, it is worth 2.4.
Ah, but you need to be able to score in the processor to get the coopertition point, right? No. Coopertition is also a red herring. It doesn’t make the reef challenge enough easier to be worth it. Instead of getting 20 coral on the reef, you only have to get 15. You are saving 5 cycles there. But you had to spend 2 cycles on the processor. And those two cycles to the processor are going to take more time that coral cycles. In the end, coopertition only saves you 3 cycles and only if your opponents go for coopertition too.
But you can solo coopertition by scoring in both processors, right? You could, but that takes another two cycles and costs you 4 points. If you solo coopertition, you have spent 19 cycles to achieve the coral ranking point instead of 20. Two of those cycles are through the cages to the other side of the field, even harder than the processor cycles on your side of the field.
OK, but you can use the processor just to clear the algae so it doesn’t get in your way, right? Even that isn’t worth it. If you never pick up algae, you can always just drive straight through it and push it out of way easily enough.
But surely algae isn’t useless? No. The processor is a distraction from having your robot score algae directly into the net. Scoring into the net is worth more points than the processor (4 instead of 2.4.) Scoring into the net can be done from further away from the net with a shooter, so cycle times to do so can be faster than to the processor. In fact, it should even be possible to clear algae from the reef and shoot it into the net from the reef. Great robots will shoot into the net while on the move back to the coral station. You can get algae in the net while cycling coral and not significantly slow down your coral cycling to do so. Shooting algae into the net while cycling coral is points for free.
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This is not going to happen reliably due to bounceout. The algae is significantly bouncier than like 2022 cargo while trying to go into a much shallower goal.
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It would be really funny if deep climb was still a red herring even though it’s so “free” this year.
1 Like
What is the first tie breaker in rankings?
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Clearly I’m very late to give an opinion about this topic but i want to say something about this. When we first saw your 24 hours cad, we had an idea to implement it to ourselves by changing the manipulator and angled sideways elevator to a rotary twisting arm on a sideways elevator, similar to the ninjineers ri3d (because we wanted to score algae to the net). When we discussed about a ground coral intake, we come to the conclusion that you need a twisting arm to pick the coral from inside of the robot, instead of an indexer to turn the coral 90 degrees (given the nature of coral makes it nearly impossible to design an indexer compact enough to fit into a robot that has a sideways elevator).
When our designers finished the basic CAD, we were amazed and terrified at the same time from what we have seen. Intakeing coral from ground came with lots of complexity, and simply a ‘new’ team like us were never have the resources or logistics to built something like that. The concept was good, but even trying to come to an understanding to overcome something like that, it was out of the window.
In conclusion, do teams need an coral ground intake? yes. But I think that having a ground intake restricts the ability to score algae too much that it becomes a downside, given scoring algae to the net will probably decide the winner at the play-off levels of a mid-competitive regional. (The teams that can do both, probably will win the einsteins in my opinion)
One extra point is more powerful than any tiebreaker. You would only prioritize the tiebreaker if there is no point differential.
tie-breaker based rankings happen way more frequently than you think
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But the number of points you can get are bounded.
As you push the limits you rapidly run into the top end and ties become more likely. Max out every match (or try to) along with other teams and all of a sudden there is no “extra points”.
Scoring anything more than the min to ensure the co-op point is the red herring (under the huge assumption it doesn’t put the win at risk)
3 Likes
Did I already say this here? Coral is the red herring.
3 Likes