As a Defense fan myself, defense has always been with Tank drive but in just terms of switching up the playing field is it smart to drive and play defense with swerve.
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Tank defense is no longer (that) effective, in order to keep up with swerve offense bots, you need a better driven swerve defense bot. Check out 4099 in 2022 Einstein Finals defending 254 for a great example of well driven swerve defense.
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Seems unnecessary to start a new thread for each of these very related topics, but yeah, swerve is a consideration in picking a defense robot. Not the only consideration, and it kind of sucks that second picks might sometimes come down to who can afford the better drivetrain, but it is a major advantage. Comes into play much more when the field is more open, and a robot can’t just sit in one location moving back and forth like in 2019.
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yes i will take a look
Gonna suggest looking at SoCal Showdown from last offseason. One of the B robots was a swerve with a vise or two clamped on, and it came close to winning the whole thing.
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While defense can be effective, as a competition gets closer to eliminations, defense will likely only come to play if a team loses it’s scoring ability rather than the initial strategy.
The ideal alliance for optimum scoring, imo, will have at least 2 hybrid scorers and 1 speaker scorer, otherwise 3 hybrids. In these scenarios, if you force a scorer to play defense you’re stealing from the flow of “efficient” points your alliance can score.
Let’s say you have a phenomenal defense robot, most likely u still need your scoring robots to have view of the source, leaving the worst view of the field to the defense bot:
Trying to long-distance defend an optimum alliance won’t do much. In may also be dangerous from a penalty point of view as your opponents may touch the podium, and you may not have the the best depth perception to not touch your opponent. Playing opportunistic defense, where your collecting notes from the source and looking to block a note on the way back to your own speaker may be effective. But that is different from a “Focused defense” bot.
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Defense in Crescendo should be played by many teams in a hybrid capacity depending on the match situation. For example if the opponent is Amplified you’re probably benefited by delaying your offensive cycle to force them to miss some shots.
Swerve drive is the drivetrain that every team should be striving to use regardless of their strategic goals.
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While I love this idea, would you have any fear of penalties if your whole alliance did this? Would this be called as shutting down a major piece of the game?
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this penalty get called… so no that wouldn’t be my concern for a hybrid defense strategy.
My bigger concern would be that teams are bad enough at following basic strategies that any kind of deviations/wrinkles like this creates opportunities for an alliance strategy to get off track. This is probably a better tactic for an individual team to follow rather than an entire alliance.
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