Aside from breaching and tackling the outer works, does anyone have thoughts about which goal (low or high) is better to score in (strategically)? My team was debating all day and we eventually were split with 2/3 of the team favoring high and 1/3 favoring low, so I was hoping to get some other opinions. Thank you!!
My personal opinion in the matter really comes down to how much time and resources are you wanting to commit to a system for high goal scoring and how much more difficult high goal scoring is compared to low goal.
I imagine most of the points won’t directly come from boulder scoring, as much from weakening defenses or such, so if doing low goal scoring is a faster cycle time for your team, then do low goal scoring so you can weaken the opponent tower quicker thus allowing for a Ranking Point or 25pts (if in playoffs).
Determine how long you think it will take to complete a cycle for each strategy with your team. This is your cycle time. (Be realistic for your team when coming up with values. It only hurts you if you are not realistic.)
Take your cycle time and divide it by 135 sec which is the tele op time in sec. (eg. 135/30)
Round down and with that number and that is the number of cycles you expect to do a match.
With the expected cycle for each strategy, take the point value for each strategy and multiply it to the expected cycles for that strategy.
With this you have a rough estimate at how many points you will score with each strategy.
The one that your team is certain it can achieve a success rate of greater than 90% each time they attempt to score.
We did a very rough calculation today using the following assumptions (they are obviously tenuous, we tried to base the guesses at the numbers on our own team’s experience with similar robots in the past, YMMV, etc):
- You are cycling/scoring alone, and not being fed balls by other robots on your alliance.
- It takes 30 seconds to grab a ball from the neutral zone and attempt to score it, either in the low goal or the high goal.
- The low goal is a guaranteed score. If you miss the high-goal, it takes 15 seconds to track the ball down and attempt to shoot again.
Taking into account only the score from the actual goals, i.e. not factoring in contribution to the capture bonus, the accuracy required for low-goal and high-goal to “break even” under these assumptions was calculated to be ~25%. Naively factoring in the capture bonus (simply by adding 25/8 points to the value of each goal, again, we know this is tenuous) raised the required accuracy to ~45%.
You can make of this what you will - it’s not intended as anything more than a guide for discussion. If you want the actual calculation, just ask, though I think there’s value in working it out for oneself. For my part, I was wholly surprised that the break-even point was so low.
One should also estimate how many attempts it would take to get the boulder in the high goal. I have seen many matches where a robot spends half the match trying to score the same game piece.
Calculating precisely this (well, rather, calculating its expectation value in terms of the accuracy of the shooter) is, indeed, required to produce the numbers I quoted.