With week 1 coming to a close, it has been interesting to see how the game is being played and it is very noticable how well good defense can slow down cycle times.
Were there any particular defense strategies that stuck out to you? And if you were an alliance capitan and choose to do 2 offense 1 defense, what did you tell your defense bot to focus on?
3O vs 2O 1D is a very interesting discussion so far, especially with the power of hybrid node scoring we’ve seen. It seems it’s hard to play D without blocking your teammates, but what I have seen being effective is teams shoveling the initial staged game pieces and dropped game pieces into their community for them to score later or better teams to score. If I were to play defense, I would mostly guard the substation opening since it is much narrower than the community and many teams aren’t scared to go over the charge pad. I haven’t played an event yet so my opinion is obviously flawed, but I am excited to play and figure this out for myself soon.
Not exactly a hot take, but there were definitely some bad takes in the first few weeks of build.
(Just linking this in for the future)
From the same thread:
[Insert general glare at 2486 from the offensive bots at Hueneme]
5920 at Clackmas. DEFINETLY them. Just watch Final #3 and you’ll see what I mean. their driver is just an absolute madlad.
Due to more rookies joining this season and a lot of teams having arms break leaving them as just drive bases, most teams are going for a double offense single defense strategy. In this case the one defense bot has to make sure that others don’t score, and this is best achieved by either going around knocking away the game pieces from opponent bots or pushing them away. As soon as auto ends, if you can scramble the remanent game pieces for the opposing alliance, you already put them in a bad position, additionally ramming them and knowing out their game pieces seems to work well as well.
While there will definitely be some superior strategies, it’ll come down to how spontaneously a driver/drive coach can make on the spot decisions.
The #2 alliance at Northern Lights ran 3o, and we found it actually worked quite well. None of the three robots had quite enough firepower on their own to win matches, and because the point scoring capability was fairly evenly distributed between the three teams (robot #3, Team 3926, my team, which was a zippy and tiny low goal cycler) we had to run triple offense. We didn’t get in each others way too much while trying this, and it worked through the finals, where our 3 robots were unable to outscore the #1 seed, but we were able to keep it relatively close.
The finals at UTWV had some pretty good defense from 9138
I think if somebody had played mega defense on 3357 with a tank perpendicular to their cycle they would have been almost shut down.
3173 was the best defense robot at South Florida our Elims match against them they are constantly playing near safe zones and never drawing penalties, both us and 695 are under constant harassment while cycling and while it may not seem like they are doing a whole lot they kept our alliance to only 4 links while we scored 6 in Finals 2.
3175 Escanaba Finals 2. Final 2 - 2023 FIM District Escanaba Event presented by Highline Fast - YouTube
They had a broken elevator and also managed to slow down alliance 2 from their previous finals match where alliance 2 scored 106 points compared to the 67 points they scored in finals 2.
We were defense for a bit in all competitions…we also scored and balanced. IF one was to build a bot that was for defense only (or like ours), add more weight. Our bot was not even close to being able to push bots around due to it being too light in comparison to opponents.
Coming from the team that received that defense, defense is effective this year.
6721 Tindley Trailblazers were critical on defense with 3940 and 461 to win FIN Week 1 at Mishawaka. In the second finals match they had a bit of a breakdown and without their defense the #2 alliance was able to eek out a win. Both 6721 and 461 won their first Blue Banners, breaking 461’s 25 year streak!
We were super disappointed in the outcome of that match as both our alliance partners had issues so we were unable to keep up with your firepower. We really wanted to reach the finals to play you guys again, but unfortunately fell just short. (Also as a sidenote one of our bumper corners actually shattered from that match, which required some repairs and ended up being a key component to us losing later on).
Thanks for the shoutout!
(second sidenote: TBA’s analysis of penalty points drawn for south florida is absolutely hilarious and a huge component to how we ended up ranked 5 while only scoring 2-3 game pieces in a match)
1714 played a hybrid offense/defense role as the number 1 captain at Lake Superior. Elite tier swerve defense is the only defense I would want on my alliance in the playoffs.
Your own alliance partners can be your toughest defenders. Clogging up the loading station and community when you are trying to get in. Many times we had to wait a few seconds to get a game piece from our loading station.
Lots of defense and traffic on display in this match from PNW Glacier Peak, Match 11 from finals.
3175 suddenly pulling out shut-down defense in the finals-deciding match. I’m shocked.
Oof I’ve never wanted a full field view more 
Being tip-prone is great defense.