The Golden 12 Second Loop

Competition Rules/Strategy
, ,
#1

If a robot is able to place a game piece every 12 seconds they will be able to complete one rocket by themselves. If each alliance player does this the alliance will fill every slot of both rockets and the cargo ship bay.

Time is counted from the start of the sandstorm to the end of the match for this. To climb the different levels of the pedestal the team will have to work faster than the 12 second loop, if cut down to a 10 second loop the team will have 20 seconds to climb to the desired level.

This entire max point strategy is easily interrupted by one of the enemies playing defense.

The main point of this is that the max score of 139 points will not be achieved very often, probably less than 10 times during the entire season, world wide. Before playoffs it will probably be rare to get more than 100 points in a single match.

What is your opinion on achieving the maximum amount of points?

7 Likes
Cycle times
How many game pieces can you actually handle in a match?
#2

Based on previous years, I almost guarantee it will happen at some point in the season. Each year, I’ve always made judgements about what the realistic team point cap is, and then it’s always broken by teams like 254. Whether the majority of teams will hit that golden loop or whether it will happen in the first several weeks of competition or not is less obvious, but I do guarantee that the top teams will hit it at some point during the season.

2 Likes
#3

The max score is higher than 139

3 Likes
#4

This is a theoretical “realistic”* score. The true max is 154.

*Calling this realistic is misleading imo, but its become fairly common talking to others that this is what they think scores will top out as.

5 Likes
#5

I think many matches will be higher than 100 and many more than 10 matches will have both rockets and cargo ship filled before the end of the match. I actually think you might find it happening more in the middle of the season than any other time because teams will have tuned in their mechanisms and then they’ll figure out how to effectively play defense.

2 Likes
#6

Presuming all these numbers exclude fouls. I agree with @YgrOksdnsHyt that we will likely see it a few times, most likely during round 1 of eliminations (e.g. 1 vs 8 or 2 vs 7 matches). I doubt anyone would be able to maintain this loop when faced with sustained competent defense.

1 Like
#7

The best gear runners in the world were cycling about 5-6 gears (or 148’s insane offseason bot that did 11 one match) a match in 2017 while having to go through the field. This post shows the averages for 180, 610, and 5687. With going a much shorter distance, it should be possible to get cycle times to allow a 12 second loop, or even faster, for the the top level teams (I imagine we will most likely be seeing this type of play become more common at MSC or Ontario DCMPS or some of the other DCMPS, probably not a regional though because the best regional teams seem to be really split up this year).

1 Like
#8

Something’s wrong with the math here? It takes 12 game pieces to complete a rocket. 12 x 12 is 144 seconds. The match is 135 seconds long, including Sandstorm.

#9

Matches are 150 seconds, not 135.

1 Like
#10

Oh wow, I missed that completely! Thanks!

#11

To be fair, there was a hard cap on (useful) gears scored in 2017. So in matches in which alliances achieved the 4th rotor, the best gearbots in the world simply stopped scoring earlier. They may have been capable of averaging more than the 5.8-6.2 that post indicates if the gear scoring was uncapped.

1 Like
#12

Do you have a link for a video of it?

#13

@dan

1 Like
#14

Keeping in mind that a lot of the cargo ship will likely get knocked down in sandstorm, I don’t think it’s unrealistic that we’ll see this “max” score more often than some people are thinking. You have 12 slots on each rocket plus 5 on the cargo ship, and with limited defense options, I think its feasible that the three robots on an alliance will fill each category. I’m thinking we’ll see it alot in semi finals and finals at michigan districts, and again in a bit less than a quarter of the matches at MSC. Remember when people thought getting 4 rotors was hard?

#15

4 rotors was 12 total gamepieces. Two full rockets and a full cargo ship is 34 total gamepieces (assuming you keep all 6 preplaced gamepieces scored).

The 4 rotor success rate in 2017 (aggregate) was only 8.8% in qualifications and 17.94% in eliminations.

1 Like
#16

While I agree that it will be harder than getting 4 rotors, I’m not sure I’m tracking with your numbers here. Each rocket is 12 gamepieces, (total 24), max for cargo ship is 8, since 8 can be preloaded.
Thats 32. (after sandstorm it will most likely be 29 or lower)

Also, keep in mind the difficulty of scoring gears at times to scoring hatch panels/cargo. Hatch panels you can pretty much just slap on and back off, there’s almost no positioning involved.

#17

Defense will probably be the game breakers this season. Not only preventing enemy bots from scoring but also stopping a defense bot from stopping your team.

#18

I agree with that max, but could you show the math you used to get to that conclusion?

#19

Only 6 game pieces may be placed by humans before the start of the match.

And I’m quite skeptical of your latter conclusion.

#20

image
image.jpg874Ă—613 180 KB

6 Pieces are place on the cargo ship, 1 piece each bay, 6 bays.