creative designs, no single dominant design at the top
unique game piece
fast and graceful swerve movement
cubes gave some lower-level teams (and some off-season builds) a feel-good way to contribute and improve their odds of being on the high end at alliance selection
lines of sight for drivers (except for in the scoring area)
-
yet another team version field element that didn’t work well and was expensive and hard to build right
hard hits at speed
dangerous extensions
red cards
lines of sight for both drivers and spectators in the scoring area
once teams got optimized, it was just a crash-avoidance dance
Overall: neutral. Better than 2010, worse than 2018. Glad it’s over.
I’m not sure poor design was to blame here. I’m guessing FIRST went through extensive testing with the charge station and if they did I’m sure they missed something than can be explained by the amount of matches played in season vs what they tested in house. At the end of the day it wasn’t designed for this aggressive level play because it never went through that aggressive testing
So almost all games will have spectator blind spots some are worse than others. I always judge based on how well you can see the game play from the lowest level of high school gym seating opposite the scoring table. My main concern is being able to see the scoring happen and which robots are doing it.
These are split into categories:
Great Sight Lines:
2009
2011
2012
2013
2014
2016*
2014 is the undisputed king of great sight lines. While some of them had small blind spots when watching the games I was never confused about who was scoring and whether they successfully scored or not. 2016 has the asterisks because depending on what defenses were selected and where it could drop it down to:
Average Sight Lines or Games Where Sight Lines Change:
2007
2008
2015
2016*
2018
2022
2007 despite having a huge structure in the middle was pretty forgiving since the game pieces were also big but once the spectator side of the rack was willed it was challenging. 2008’s biggest issue was other robots and the game pieces blocking views. 2015 and 2018 both became challenging to see as the game progressed. While 2022 had a pretty big blind spot on the backside of the hub but the nature of the game helped it not be too unfriendly.
Bad Sight Lines:
2010
2017
2019
2023
2010 is a nightmare game with it’s only saving grace being how teams figured out how to break it in game play or ranking, so of course it also was bad to watch with giant blind spots. 2017 is the worst sight lines in my entire time in FRCFIRST Robotics Competition. 2019 is a game with horrendous sight lines as well rivaling 2017, however the design of the game helped it be better than 2017 since it was typically very obvious when someone succeeded in scoring. 2023 could have been somewhat saved by flipping the human player stations to the other side however FIRST does not seem to want to put Human Players in front of the scoring table.
It’s not all bad, but designing a game with everyone full-field cycling, making the field mirrored to force drive paths to cross, and having harsh rules that penalize teams for collisions when moving fast is a… frustrating… game design choice… I’ll say.
If you want “robot interaction” by designing the field this way, don’t penalize the natural conclusions of those interactions. Just keep the main driving paths separated otherwise. Choose one please.
Assuming the game was probably conceptualized around 2020 using the GDCGame Design Committee two year game design cycle (and the skip of 2021 due to COVID) along with the fact that NEOs and Falcons were released in 2019/2020, I think the oversight on the amount of damage the charge stations would receive over the course of a season is understandable and something that will probably be accounted for in future games.
The thread seems to be lukewarm-to-negative on Charged Up, whereas I feel pretty good about the game we played this season!
Positives:
I like games where low level teams have something to do that is valuable even up to the highest levels. 2023 you’d see cube specialists playing the game even at cmp/dcmp levels.
Relatedly, I like games where the top teams need to do all the tasks in the game, they can’t just skip the tasks the low level teams are doing. See: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014 as other good examples
Triple offense was viable at all levels!
Game pieces were great! Durable, named appropriately, cones were a new and engaging challenge.
Variety in robot design was high! Elevators, arms, side roller intakes, top roller intakes, pinchers, shooters, etc.
Difficult game to dominate(Boo 2018), but also not a crapshoot (Boo 2017). Three decent teams could beat one elite team.
Loved the increased levels of automation enabled by the game and by the apriltags making localization easier than ever. Excited to see where that goes!
Negatives:
Bad game for tank drive . You could get around it with good design but it required a lot of effort (See: 319, 3357)
Defense wasn’t really viable at most levels of the game. It could certainly have some impact, especially early on, but by the end it was clear that triple offense was byfar the best strategy.
Mild field issues including charge station breakages, the asymmetric-ness caused collisions, and those collisions were made more brutal by the game design rewarding fast-moving high-CG robots.
Given it was a pick-n-place game and not a shooting game (mostly) - pretty dang good! Probably the best pick-n-place game since at least 2007 IMO.
Agree with most of this but I’d edit that endgame was either too easy or overvalued. A good endgame should make it more challenging to answer the question “do we balance or do we keep scoring?”
From the stands perspective, I’d say that this game was a lot better to watch than I expected. The full-field cycles and congestion point in the middle made good alliance coordination really critical, and it was beautiful to watch when it all worked. It was hard for one team to carry an alliance which resulted in fighting hard for every scrap of advantage. I like that and think it adds to the overall experience.
Its been mentioned a bunch, but the diversity of design was great. There were at least 5 competitive robot archetypes at the top levels of play, along with some simple designs that almost any team could find success with. That’s a rarity in frc.
Overall, I’d give it maybe a 7/10 on the whole? I had it in my head as a 4/10 on kickoff, so it grew on me.
I feel like endgame (or the charging station in general) being overvalued/too easy may be a valid perspective for the Championship or high-competition regional levels, but at least my opinion on it at both of our regionals was that it very, very clearly was not too easy for the vast majority of teams we played with.
From a broader perspective:
I actually did enjoy designing for more horizontal extension, since that was a new-ish challenge for FRC games
Having designed for horizontal extension, especially in combination with vertical extension, I think it’s pretty clear that it shouldn’t become a common feature in games, and if it does return more care and thought needs to be given to overall program safety
I really liked cones as a gamepiece
I enjoyed the simplicity of the end game-- depending on exactly how you approached it as an alliance, it was between a “looks easy, is easy” and a “looks hard, is easy”
I liked the high ceiling to programming this game had, while still being approachable without great software chops
For a score… I don’t know. 5/10? Definitely not my favorite, also not an abysmal game. Chopping off the absolute worst matches (which are always a slog), this game was pleasantly watchable and playable particularly for the middle 75% of teams.
I liked a lot of the same things listed above, especially the capacity for automation (which we took advantage of significantly). My few gripes:
horizontal extension is a good engineering challenge. Please don’t bring it back to this degree (pun intended).
if there had been a good way to put the HO stations on the scoring table side (especially with under-carpet CS cables), this game would be MUCH better for viewing. I ended up videoing from behind our opponent’s alliance wall when we were lucky to have a balcony or tall audience seating there.
“assault the substation” tactics and robots slamming into the grid are hard on driver station and field electronics (side note, apparently our DS Ethernet port is wearing out…that’s fun to find out the hard way)
lots of robots dying in midfield collisions, to the point where mid-playoffs matches became “when will it become a 2v3, and will the dead bot become a penalty magnet”
team elements were bulky. We ended up building a much lighter and mobile version using steel angle that maintained apriltag spacing, since it was 4 nodes in one piece:
Score: 8/10? I’m probably biased by our improved competitiveness overall the last two years compared to prior games I was around for.
I absolutely agree that 2023 is a bad year for tank, and I don’t think you could really get around it. With sufficient drive practice and a small fast tank we were able to do well in spite of tank, but we would have been significantly better off with swerve.
Overall I think 2023 is pretty good for a pick and place, but charge stations needed another revision for reliability.
I’d say that the connection of the Charged Up theme and branding to what the game actually was is very weak (assuming this was meant to be the transportation game). And the charge station failing to tip the correct way as the season went on was a big bummer for us - it worked perfectly at the two district events, was okay at states, and by champs was only working on the practice field and not in matches.
But the challenge was fun and different, and we had our best season ever.
I was overall surprised with how fun the game was to play, after kickoff a lot of our team felt weird about the game especially after how much fun we had with Rapid React.
But just some thoughts.
Good things:
Scoring was able to be done in many different ways… so it was cool seeing how much variation there was in the robots of the best teams
At high (champs) levels of play a good strategy executed well could make up for pure cycling ability and the game felt pretty strategic during the match vs just keep shooting balls.
At the highest levels of play (like IRI, Cheesy) it was really fun supercharging
I liked the challenge of the bump size auto and use of AprilTags/Object Detection that teams used (but would like to see more tags on the field)
Bad Things:
Defense was kind of random and not super effective, penalties and refs seeing fouls had a lot of weight on the outcome of a match for alliances that were closely matched
Charge station… the endgame was “too easy” but also easy to get messed up (saw too many times where teams would have the ranking point then basically throw because they tried to get a 3rd on, or one of the teams wasn’t paying attention and tried to join last second messing it up for the whole alliance). Also the at home version out of wood was so hard to get to react even closely similar to the real field.
Visibility, not a huge deal but as a coach it felt like i had to get up close and personal too much at times just to see the bottom row of the grid and the polycarb reflections could trick you sometimes if you weren’t paying attention.
Overall I actually liked it, it was a fun game to play and strategize for. Just had frustrating moments.
. You could get around it with good design but it required a lot of effort (See: 319, 3357)