Uncooperative Alliance Partners

FIRST General Forum
#49

You are by no means the only team to experience this.

As other mentors and team leads have said before, the whole of the match would need to have been seen by all to make assessment. That being said, your overall performance would reflect your abilities. When we "Active"ly scout teams, not just in the pits, we see for ourselves how each team performs from the stands and log it into a program that we write. All teams, us included, can tell all other teams in the pits that we can do everything. All I will say is “the proof is in the pudding!” even though your robot may have the capability programming could work against you, you could have a mechanical failure or even a human malfunction.

All of these things work themselves out as far as “Robot Performance”. Now sometimes the algorithm works in your favor during match play and sometimes not. BUT remember what I said about “ACTIVE” scouting, it does reflect the true data of team and robot performance. Don’t waste your energies on a single team that is full of themselves. If you show grace to them, then that displays your gracious professionalism!

#50

Every been the best team on an alliance and had an aggressive strategist from another team come up to you and tell you what you are going to? I have, alot.

I have had so many aggressive strategist come up and dominate a pre-match strategy meeting that I have gotten to the point that I don’t really care what they say anymore.

Basically I like to discuss strategy in the que with the drivers and the other coaches. It is much easier to get an honest appraisal from drive teams there than anywhere else and easier to come up with an agreed upon strategy.

#51

Remind them during the match - drive coach to drive coach. As Mike states, a pre-match huddle to review the plan is also a good reminder.

I forgot to do a pre-match review with my drivers about a double climb strategy we discussed in the pits. Needless to say we didn’t execute very well at the end of that game. My bad. We weren’t trying to be “uncooperative.”

This game is very dynamic to coach and as a result is very fun to play. On the flip side, the game can get chaotic and teams may have to go with plan B or something they are more practiced at doing.

Putting someone on a DNP list without clarifying your confusion with the team in question post match is not good advice.

David

#52

One of the Quals matches last weekend, we built a solid game strategy and had a pre-match huddle to clearly go over each team’s role in the match. This was all well understood by every member of the drive team. In this case, my team was going to be responsible for the scale, Team 2 would run switch and help scale as necessary, Team 3 would focus exchange/vault only.

Immediately following autonomous, both Teams 2 and 3 drove straight for the scale to score on it (without telling me they would do so), rendering that area of the field way too crowded for our bot to complete our piece of the strategy. Meanwhile the vault was being ignored, so I instructed my drive team to switch our plan in-game and start filling the vault. I then informed the other teams of our intention to do so. The change in strategy annoyed me a bit and completely confused my drivers, but we did what we did to win the match and move on.

So, it happens… strategies fall apart and robots break down (the other most significant cause of strategy switch-ups) but thats the key to being on top of things during the match and communicating your intentions to the other coaches.

#53

Question to all…

For those of you that DNP partners in quals for being uncooperative, do you tell them this? How do you communicate this feedback?

#54

1 Like
#55

I will tell a mentor on the team if there was something serious that made us not pick them. Generally, if a team changes from agreed upon strategy we will check with them. Sometimes information we didn’t know or didn’t hear caused the change, and it was perfectly reasonable. After action chats are often helpful. Just this year we had a match where we made a mistake and got stuck on the scale. I asked an ally to push us off the scale. They heard “push the scale off of us” and didn’t want to risk a card so they didn’t. After a mentor to mentor chat we laughed at neither of us having our finest moment.

#56

I just make a mental note of their uncooperative behavior and relay it back to our scouting team. If they wouldn’t cooperate after showing them your scouting data of their robot, chances are they won’t change their tune if they know you DNPed them. Some (drive) teams aren’t worth the trouble.

#57

I have experienced my fair share of dictating teams over the years, and I have come to explicitly remember those coach’s faces and have a dislike for them. I understand that when you’re an alliance captain you earn a level of respect for being in charge, but working collectively is still important and to know inputs from your alliance partners. In one of the matches at our regional, the coach to one of the teams we were with was yelling at my drive team for a solid 10 seconds thinking the other partner’s robot was ours. He apologized, but it was still upsetting. Then later they were yelling at us to change strategy within the match despite how specific our last strategy had been in terms of order to act.

There is a high chance for complications in strategy to arise, but when that happens it’s important to make sure you at least communicate with your alliance partners. It’s also important to be understanding of alliance partners, because even if an alliance partner lets you down one match, there’s a chance there’s another match where you’re the one who was having bad luck and had to ditch what they were doing.

#58

Thank you for the replies and the insight. This was my first time experiencing this situation and wanted as much advice as possible to handle this better again in the future.

This is a good idea. We typically do the thing before our matches (except without a strategy board). But I think we could improve this. Thanks.

#59

Can’t describe how important this is. Especially if you talk with alliances before queue, it’s always important to go over your strategy! This year we had an entirely new drive team, and I think they occasionally forgot the strategy at hand. Especially if you’re with big teams, it might seem embarrassing to go ask about strategy a second time. This also gives other teams a chance to speak up a second time if they are unsure about their position.

#60

We attempt to make it very clear that we were displeased about their performance and choices, but try not to be rude at the same time (GP everyone!! Woodie is watching). It could just be that they got nervous or started panicking, or it could be their first time. I just mark them down for later reference, and will usually watch their performance in later matches.

#61

For many teams (like mine when I was around), the drive team and scouting were separate entities, and I wouldn’t know whether a team abandoned the plan until I met with drive team the night after. That being said, if I really had doubts on a team’s tendencies for this kind of thing, I would ask other alliance partners.

Also, I can say from experience that putting together an alliance that works well together is crucial for an alliance captain, even if it means they take a back seat. Back at CHS DCMP 2016, we played defense as an alliance captain even though we could put quite a few boulders in, and we came a broken robot away from winning the event. Selflessness can go far.

#62

I’ve never been part of our drive team, but I’ve heard re-caps of conversations where it seems like some of the bigger/more aggressive teams have a sort of coerciveness at competitions.

There’s an aspect of respecting the more “dominant” teams, because they probably know what they’re doing at this point, but it’s a little disappointing when the teams come to your team and say “this is what you’re going to do.” without any real discussion

#63

Awesome little addition to the usual setup, how often is there push back or additional information requested in this last minute meeting?

#64

Here is our teams process for approaching match strategy:
->Decide upon Auto strategy based scouting data and teams response to confidence level on their programming. (Will send software team over if they need help)
->Assess our two partners in game execution and plan for a game plan that can maximize their strengths and minimize chances for getting penalties.
->Draw out he strategy on a paper copy of the field which will be used to show auto line ups, teleop routes, and any potential defensive strategy. We usually do this with in the pits with all 3 drive teams.
->In the queue the drive coach will go over the same strategy sheet to address any concerns or questions.
->Brief drivers on fall back plans, incase the strategy does not go to plan or someone dies on the field.
->After match we document on that strategy our partners were able to do, pros/cons

#65

But…Shahil…

how many wins you got?

1 Like
#66

But Akash…

How many pointless posts do you have?

#67

7000

#68

I had a discussion with another mentor (not my team) yesterday and this general subject came up. Their team was wondering how to scout other teams in terms of how cooperative/collaborative other teams are. I said that we do try to make sure that we take notes after every match about things the scouting team feels are important. And that often we will have notes like “team x got in their alliance mate’s way 3 times” or “it looked like their strategy broke down.” In these cases, if we end up with multiple instances of comments like that for a team, and we have not played with them, we may move then down on our pick list. If we have played with a team we will weight our experience with them much more heavily than the observations. I will also point out that while we have put teams with good robots on our do not pick list because they tried to dictate strategy rather than collaborate on strategy, we have also selected and been selected by teams with whom we cooperated well. It is sometimes the case that two pretty good robots that play well together can beat two very good robots that don’t collaborate well.

We do try to briefly recap strategy while in the cue. In particular we like to talk about where each team will be in autonomous and what we each plan to do as soon as teleop starts. Also, if conditions change we try to quickly communicate this with allies. This is not only common courtesy, it is good match strategy. I remember a match in 2013 where the plan was for us to play defense. About 45 seconds into the match 1038’s shooter jammed. As soon as they realized they told us to trade roles. We still lost the match, but we were able to make it very close by communicating well.