I understand that FIRST was making an effort to reduce field damage and robot damage, but creating what is essentially Recycle Rush 2 isn’t a very fun watch from a spectator point of view or fun to traverse from a driver’s point of view because there is so little contact allowed through gameplay. Should the loading stations have been swapped to the opposing alliance’s wall?
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So FIRST styled the rules of defense to be very similar to 2019. The only difference is 2019 you were safe when acquiring game pieces not when scoring them. 2025 you are safe when scoring game pieces but not when acquiring them.
Let me tell you this game just like 2019 is not a no defense game and if played right will be brutal
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This was my thought as well. Full field hits are not the only way to play defense, and if 2019 taught us anything there will be good defensive strategies to come from the restrictions put in place. We’ve had a lot of games recently that require full field cycles, I’m glad they’ve changed it up a bit for this one
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Exactly. Especially with swerve, you have a very small area of the field. It will be very easy for a single good defensive robot to shut down one feeder station and force the opposing alliance to only use the other. And there was a LOT of contact in 2019. Expect higher gear ratios for more acceleration and pushing power.
What FIRST removed is the high speed collisions. And I’m not sorry to see them gone for a little bit.
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To be fair 2019 wasn’t exactly safe from that either
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No notes coral no points
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Just because its not allowed doesn’t mesn you cant do it… (evil grin emoji…)
If you think 2019 wasn’t defense, I’d like to refer you to my profile banner… 
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I don’t really have much faith in the “sit in front of 1 of 2 loaders” defense. At least 2019 had multiple spots on the rockets to score at. Also with the extremely widespread adoption of swerve I’m not expecting much counterplay at Regional levels.
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This is a very large stretch. In addition to 2019 rules, the pin count is reduced to 3 seconds and the field layout is extremely unfriendly for defense, and the defendable actions don’t require extreme amounts of precision. 2019 defense worked because the field was force engagements with the defender by being crowded. This year’s field is wide open with protected zones in the center that make it easy to draw penalties from defenders, and not enough restrictions for defenders to force engagements except for the reload zone, which there are two of them and they aren’t very obstructed, adding plenty of tools to play around defense.
Of the general ways to play defense
- Man on man defense isn’t very effective due to reduced pincount both decreasing the effectiveness of pins and increasing the risk of fouls and the ease of getting to protected zone drawing even more fouls
- It is difficult to intentionally crowd the field due to 1 defender and a wide open field
- Scoring cannot be denied due to drawing a foul
- Opportunistic defense is not a thing due to the slowness of getting to the other side of the field.
- There’s enough coral that starvation won’t happen, there’s significantly more coral than places to score
- The protected zone is centralized so defenders are always as risk of drawing fouls when doing anything beyond staying at a single reload zone
- Offensive robot gain more advantage out of swerve than defense robots do due to offensive bots better being able to exploit the reaction time of the opposing drivers, which is even further exaggerated by robots this year wanting to gear for maximum acceleration allowing for more aggressive and unpredictable movements than prior seasons.
- Swerve robots can easily dodge any hits or ramming from the center of the field due to the reaction time advantage
At best, you can try to play defense on the reload zone, but there’s 2 of them and its easy enough to jump between them due to no obstructions that the defender can’t really slow down a robot more than they can score unless they are unable to score. In addition, defense in this game is 100% committal while serving no offensive purpose. It doesn’t decrowed the field like it did in 2019, and it can’t be used offensively like 2024 counterfeed or note stealing.
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Not a huge fan of it either, because even if there technically is a defense strategy, it’s possible that no one, or almost no one, will use it. Personally, I hope people do use it, but from what I’ve heard a lot of people want to avoid it all together
Another thing to mention is that that source defense last year was effective because it was the defender’s advantage in terms of how far away the defense is happening. A lot easier playing defense if contact is happening right in front of your driver station, and the bot you’re defending has its drivers looking cross-field. Playing defense this year is going to be a lot harder skill-wise because altercations are happening much further from the defender and the line of sight for the defender can be broken by their own reef, cages, the opponents reef, and other robots.
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I am currently of the opposite opinion on this, I think defense is going to win tournaments, but I’m obviously just speculating with limited knowledge or analysis. Cutting off one loading point means three scoring robots are waiting for each other at the other zone, I can see that being at least frustrating.
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Maybe some district events where you run out of scoring robots, sure. But when there are scoring robots available, I don’t see it being that problematic, especially if alliances stagger their cycles or use funnel intake. Fighting through the defense is also an option, because with a good funnel/hopper intake, you don’t need to be in the loading station for very long and the human player can introduce the coral with force to accelerate the loading process.
In 2019, going to the other loading station was a common and effective option under some types of defense, and its much easier to go to the other loading station with swerve and an open field compared to tank and a closed field.