As a fan of 254 and a fan of sports in general, I thought the team swap with the 4th alliance in the last match was really cool. Unless it’s because something was broken, it seemed pretty gutsy. Guessing the robot playing prior was better offensively but they opted for defense.
Anyone have any insight on why that decision was made? Really curious.
Look at this post, I think it addresses your question.
Ah. Must be missing it but I don’t think so
A not insignificant part of the decision was that 6672’s intake passively deploys and cannot retract mid match without ramming it into the wall to collapse it. As a result, you’ll notice their intake didn’t deploy in previous matches, to avoid the possibility of intake fouls during rough play. That prevented our alliance from holding 2 opponent balls the whole match. 3175 allowed us to do that.
Our alliance loved the defense (and offense) both of these robots provided. Both had awesome drivers. 6672 played very good defense during RR and their L4 climb ensured we would have margin on the first tiebreaker, since nobody else on Einstein had a 45 pt endgame.
3175 was an absolute monster out there when it mattered most. Phenomenal call by the alliance, likewise phenomenal work by 3175 to step into that situation and rock it.
I can’t imagine how nervous I’d be as the driver to come in on the tiebreaker of the world championship.
They joined the match and played lock down defense. Clutch! Well maybe not lock down but pretty effective defense
To further elaborate and provide some context:
We (speaking for 1619+254 from here on when I say “we”) were very comfortable playing with either 6672 or 3175 on our alliance. Both were great robots and great to work with. But they brought slightly different things to our alliance.
We had great confidence that both partners would play awesome defense when called upon, and they did. 6672 brought the triple traversal capability, and could shoot from further away, while 3175 brought a reliable fender shot and the ability to do more with opponent balls.
We chose these teams because we wanted the option to play either a triple offense or 2+1 configuration with either team. Both robots were extremely high quality and we were confident they could survive the meat-grinder of Championship eliminations. In division elims we played one match with each third robot, to try things out and assess chemistry, and both partners absolutely rocked it - so we decided to go from there primarily with 6672 because of the triple traversal (which we knew would be important should we make it to the Round Robin, since hangar points are the first tiebreaker). We played a version of triple offense (where 254 also targets opponent balls to lob back to our side of the field) throughout division elims, mostly to see if there was a variation of it that could overpower an opponent playing heavy defense. While we won all the matches, things were tight enough (and the other Einstein alliances strong enough) that we were not confident that this configuration would be successful subsequently, so we switched to a more conventional 2+1 from there.
So we switched to a 2+1 configuration, leaving in 6672 to maximize endgame points, throughout the round robin. This was absolutely the right move, as we were able to defeat 3 of our first 4 opponents thanks to their defense (despite a lot of autonomous problems on these unfamiliar fields) and had built a healthy lead in hangar points. Going into our last match, we actually discussed possibly just hanging immediately in the match to clinch the tiebreaker, but decided instead to play conventionally and just go for the endgame with an extra time buffer (which took away our defense and scoring earlier than usual), so we were not overly disappointed by that loss (still, full credit to the Carver champions for beating us!).
In this configuration, we split the field in a “hamburger” style between the scorers: 254 took the far side and 1619 the near side. We believed this played to the teams’ strengths. The drive coaches could call for a rotation to “hot dog” or to switch sides if needed to peel away from defense (and we did rotate for a bit in some matches).
In the finals, we decided to go with the same configuration that worked well for us through the round-robin, since it was a known quantity and had already defeated the Turing alliance. Finals 1 was a one-point win (that has been extensively discussed) despite a catastrophic failure in autonomous by 254, so we went into Finals 2 with largely the same plan, hoping that auto would not fail in the same way and build a bigger point differential (in addition to some subtle tweaks: 254 trying harder not to get pinned by 4099 and 6672 trying to defend 1577 for longer before the endgame, being willing to forego the triple if necessary to take easy balls off the table for the opponent). Had we lost Finals 1, I think we absolutely would have called the audible we made in Finals 3 earlier.
Finals 2 made it clear that Turing had our number and we had to change things up. We made the following changes for Finals 3:
Our F3 configuration was clearly the right move. 3175 has ice water in their veins. Before we made the call, I remember asking Jason (their drive coach) if they were up for this, and the calmness and confidence in his eyes and voice told me everything we needed to know.
All in all, this was probably the strongest 4-team alliance I’ve ever been a part of in FRC.
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