Alright so after an update, the noddles are now marked with your alliance color and won’t give the other team 4 points if you drop it on your own side.
We can’t use the bots to toss the LITTER over the step.
You can’t have a device for throwing from the player station.
You can’t bundle the noodles together (for stiffness and weight).
Intentionally littering (even in the opposing alliance) kind of goes against the recycling theme.
Our team practiced throwing and roughly 1/20 throws achieved the distance needed to score.
This seems like a nearly impossible task to throw LITTER and expect points (even without the other alliance bots foiling your master plan).
If it is unreasonable to expect points, why even offer the points? The rest of the game is separated anyway (with the exception of the step).
Have you found a way to reliably through LITTER 30+ ft?
Simple, they want us to score them in the green containers. The reason they give points for throwing them is the same reason there was catching last year, it only happened rarely, but it was an exciting thing to see.
Its probably more equatable to the balls in 2012 - the robot is FIRST’s ideal scoring platform, but human players with regularly score then alongside whatever the robots score.
As far as how to score them, practice and don’t throw them full force. Throw it like you would a paper airplane - gentle, but still with a decent push.
In response to my own question here is one reason throwing noodles could be beneficial.
You only need to get 2-3 noodles across to the other alliance.
They need to be spread apart.
The strategy behind it:
You sacrifice ~3 points by not putting it in your own landfill - if your bot can place (not stack) 2 totes in the same time it takes to move noodles to the landfill then it’s not much of a loss to you.
The other alliance now has to make a choice…
Choice one - ignore the ~3 noodles thrown on your own side.
pro - you gain more points with the totes/bins
con - you let the other alliance gain 12 pts
Choice two - landfill the noodles
pro - other alliance losses 3 pts
con - you don’t gain as many points as you would while focusing on totes/bins
This is also dependent on where the noodles land of course. Next to the landfill requires a simple push. Spread on the far end requires time to gather.
Think about it a bit before outright poopooing it.
Our team have tried throwing the noodles the distance needed to get across to the other side of the field and we found it is VERY difficult to get it to the other side accurately. Our team has decided to just completely ditch the idea of throwing noodles and just focusing on totes/bins.
My team is lucky enough to have a half field at our build site. There are members of our team who have thrown 5 or 6 out of 10 over the step. I think we will be attempting to throw litter.
This game is more like Diabolical Dynamics (2001) where four teams in an alliance were asked to work together against the clock to gain the highest score, except now, there are two games being played at once.
Ideally, I think the GDC wanted the four recycling containers and co-opertion stacks to be the object of interaction between each side. They have more potential worth than a few noodles that may make it beyond the landfill zone.
There is little value in subtracting from your opponents score, especially when it is averaged over all of their matches, unless you are ranked below one of the opposing teams by mere decimal points.
Throwing the noodles will give the humans something to occupy their time, but not during the endgame. It will be interesting to see if noodles being thrown rather than placed in a container make a significant difference in any competition this year.
This being said, I think your time and effort would be better spent strategizing your endgame with your alliance and possibly moving any remaining noodles into your landfill rather than trying to “attack” the opposing alliance.