Thank-you pmattin5459 for starting the popular “Why the low gear love?” thread about the merits of focusing on gears. Great discussion.
I borrowed your title, trading “gear” for “defense”, because it seems like there would have been a thread by now discussing how to best play defense to prevent a strong gearbot alliance’s achievement of their 4th rotor, given the devastatingly huge 100-point bonus in elims. Is scoring 100 points worth your time? Blocking the other team from scoring 100 points should be equally worth your time, especially if your alliance itself can achieve 3 but not 4 rotors. Get the 3 rotors and then block the other alliance’s 4th (& maybe score a bit of fuel to tie break); that’s my premise.
A few questions to start…
Can anyone point to any specific matches where an alliance used defense to block a very strong opposing gearbot alliance’s 4th rotor?
Anybody feel like they’ve got gear defense dialed in? Please share. Does emptying all fuel hoppers at the start of the match really help much? How about positioning (better to slow opponents down at choke points on the sides of the airships or better to harass via bumping at gear drop off?)
Any theories on optimal tactics based on past years?
Any strong gearbot people care to share what works against them?
I can think of a couple times that defense has made a huge difference in matches so far. One example that comes to mind specifically is Rocket City Final 2 (https://youtu.be/TTHB9CTz6Rc?t=8h49m36s). Although the Red alliance did not win, they stopped the Blue alliance (who showed they could easily get 4 rotors) from their goal using heavy neutral zone and airship defense.
From experimenting at Miami Valley and Rocket City with defense, I can pretty confidently say that the most effective defense for us was Neutral Zone Choke-Point defense. Although defense on the pegs can be very effective for shutting down one robot, choke-point defense can be incredibly effective against many robots at the same time (again, see the video above. This time, watch for the blue alliance’s choke-point defense). Not to mention, a skilled team playing choke-point defense can also draw a tech foul by pushing the other robot into their retrieval zone.
As for dumping all the hoppers, this really had no effect during the match. Most robots seem to be able to easily brush fuel away, making it almost pointless to dump all the balls. The only time we found this strategy effective was when we were up against a team who focused on shooting balls as opposed to placing gears (ball intakes are significantly slower than hoppers).
This is generally what worked for us (a swerve drive bot). Would love to hear what others are thinking!
I’d take a look at Elims at this year’s Smoky Mountains Regional, specifically Alliance 3. They got 4 rotors and 3 climbs in both Quarterfinal matches, solidly beating the #6 Alliance. First match of Semis, they narrowly beat Alliance 2 with 3 rotors and 3 climbs, while Alliance 2 had a robot unable to move. Second match was more of an all-aggro match, with Alliance 3 getting 4 rotors and the ticket to Finals. So going into Finals, Alliance 3 looked the clear favorite compared to Alliance 5, who had not gotten 4 rotors at any point. But Alliance 5 was able to play some excellent defense to prevent Alliance 3 getting that 4th rotor and capitalized on some missed climbs to take home the blue banner.
Alliance 5 also got some free climb points in Finals 1 due to some opportunistic repositioning of an Alliance 3 robot when the ropes were dropped.
I and others on my team were actually not expecting to be able to easily take down the seemingly more offensively capable Alliance 3 - especially not in 2 matches. Our alliance was however prepared to make a trainwreck of the game flow with defense in order to deny 4 rotors at all costs. 48 and 3140 handled the derailing while 744 usually hung a 2nd gear in auto (3 rotors sooner = more defense sooner), 744 scored gears reliably with 48’s support, and 744 also scored enough fuel in auto and teleop to give us a few tiebreaker points every match. All of that and a bit of luck in our favor helped turned the tide, even with various climb troubles demonstrated by each of the alliance bots.
I’ll take the thinking approach in that you got two alliances that are very similar and both are very much capable of four rotors without defense. Say they both go for four rotors and get it. The game then comes down to autonomous, fuel, and climbing. Now lets say one or both alliances play some effective defense and the game ends up being three rotors to three rotors. The game still comes down to autonomous, fuel, and climbing. In essence, nothing really changed. What would dictate what approach each alliance does really comes down to whether they are more confident in their gear ability vs their defensive ability. Basically I don’t see why you shouldn’t try and go for four rotors if you can reliably do it. This stops making sense if an alliance is clearly unreliable at getting the four rotor.
That said, if one alliance knows they have a have a definitive fuel advantage, it stops making much sense to do four rotors since you would get basically the same result with less time to score your fuel advantage by going for four rotors.
During Tech Valley semifinals series 1, we faced the #1 alliance (195, 20, 6459) who played a fuel, 3 rotors, and defense strategy against us and our three gear cyclers. The first match, despite 20’s skillful defense, we put up 4 rotors. The second match, 195 joined in on defending us, and they scored 40 kPa while we missed four rotors. The third match, neither of us got our bonus points, and 20 missed their climb so we advanced. If it weren’t for 20 missing the climb, we would have been toast and defense would have won them the series.
In finals, we faced another alliance who could consistently score four rotors with triple offense. We looked at our scouting data and found that one of our opponents sometimes had trouble loading gears at the feeder station. So, our strategy was simple: trigger the hopper nearest their loading station, then go give gears our all. It wasn’t a huge advantage, but that defensive maneuver gave us the edge we needed to emerge victorious.
Defense is absolutely key to winning. Bump and run stuff won’t cut it.
You need to utilize choke points, maximize pin counts, and know which robot is the best robot to slow down.
Our alliance at the St. Louis Regional was able to win with 1706 being the only robot there capable of scoring 40kpa on their own combined with effective defense primarily by 537 that allowed us to only need to score enough gears to start 2 rotors in order to win. In the quarters and finals we ended up scoring enough gears to start 3 rotors although it was not necessary to win. We honestly expected more defense to be played on 1706 which is why we often had 537 aid in getting the 40kpa. Here is a video from the semis against an alliance who had previously gotten 4 rotors in their last two quarterfinal matches.
At Wisconsin our alliance proved we could put up enough gears in the quarters to start 4 rotors but after that we knew we would run into defense and rather than waste time trying to score an additional 6 gears against defense we decided to just go for 3 rotors, some fuel, and defense. Match footage of the semis is probably the best example of defense played by our alliance but it is buried somewhere within the archived footage. We again were able to prevent an alliance who had gotten 4 rotors in their previous 2 quarterfinal matches from getting 4 rotors and we were able to squeak out a win with the fuel advantage.
Here is a video of us employing the same strategy in the finals but against an alliance designed around a similar strategy to ours (3 rotors, fuel, and defense). 5976 unfortunately lost connection for part of the match which made it significantly easier to hold the other alliance to just the rotors they started with their starting gears.
With all the talk about 3+D, I want to throw out 4+D as a legitimate strategy in certain situations as well. If you know that your opponents have a good 4 rotor game and also lead in a tiebreaker like fuel or auton rotors, you pretty much have to go for 4 rotors and play D at the same time. Difficult, but not impossible, especially if your alliance can get 4 rotors faster.
I’ll see your poorly made battery holder and raise you a new Kevlar rope with trust issues. We swapped from our orange ropes we used at Miami Valley (extremely fast and reliable acquisition) to a much stronger Kevlar rope at SMR. I think the new rope was a bit too long, which led to some inconsistent hanging relative to Miami Valley. We’ve got a few weeks before Seven Rivers - we’ll evaluate and iterate to improve rope acquisition speed for the final events.
Sorry to talk about OFFENSE in a defensive thread (hypocrite).
And here I was thinking that you’d be saying something like “low defense love is because 48 hasn’t been mentioned yet”. Silly me.
I’ve seen a couple of matches won and lost because of smart D. And hard-hitting D too. I think everybody was surprised at L.A. SF1-1 when the 1 alliance–who fairly reliably got 4 rotors and 3 climbs–turned to defense against the 5 alliance, who dished it right back at them and won the first match. (And then lost the next two.)
– 20 of them won their events
– 8 of them lost to alliances that got 4 rotors when playing against them
– 4 of them lost to alliances that were inconsistent with 4 rotors when playing against them
– 9 of them lost to alliances that did not get 4 rotors when playing against them
It looks like at this point, in order to beat 4 rotors, alliances are having more success going for 4 rotors themselves. Of course, if you know you can’t get there, you have to do 3+D.
Correction: 1259’s alliance at St. Louis lost to defense, not 4 rotors. The number counts above have been changed to reflect this, but not the image.
At southern newhampshire the number 8 seed won the entire event soley by playing Defense and not allowing there opponents to achieve 4 rotors.
They were the only alliance unable to achieve 4 rotors, IMO they beat the 1seed by playing defense and out scoring them in fuel, then went on to beat all proceeding alliances in the same manner. They basically did a full court press on one robot who they felt was best at cycles followed then from one side to the other slowing them down the entire way,
It obviously worked as they came away with the blue…
Videos haven’t been posted yet
This was mostly possible because of 238 playing really good defense, and then we all played defense once we had the three rotors. Fuel in auto and a bit in teleop made it so we couldn’t lose to an alliance who didn’t score fuel(1st seed).
In Indiana this weekend, our alliance (3940, 3947, and 5484) was able to play very effective defense against alliance 2 (1501, 234, and 2197). If you watch 3947, they spend the whole match staying down in the red alliance airship ready to harass anyone that tries to place a gear. Around the 2 minute mark you can see that this forces 1501 to go get another gear.
(If we had gotten the the third rotor, we would have won that match.)
Take a look at the elimination matches at the Rhode Island district, 2168-78-6731 had a solid strategy. 2168 and 78 went full on gears, and 6731 played some excellent zone defense slowing down the opponents getting to the loading zone by closing off the area between their own air ship and the field perimeter. A bonus to this was that they were able to do this right up until they went to climb, which they were already in position for.
Our team (gear runner almost exclusively) has an interesting set of issues/strategies I’d like to share.
With a 6 CIM drive, we can go really fast. I mean, really fast. We ended up swapping our gearing because we just went too fast, and had no pushing power or acceleration. Anyway, defense was very effective against us at our first competition (for a while anyway). Really just pillar maneuvers were enough to throw us off, but that isn’t much of an issue with our strategy.
As driver, I prefer to take the long way around the airship. Not only does this avoid defense, but I also get a chance to play defense. I keep an eye on the opposing alliance’s robots, and if they are trying to set down a gear, I just nick their bumper. This costs me no time, and I’m going fast through there. The robot’s inertia is enough to throw them off, even if we have no pushing power. I never hit them square, just their corner. This wastes about 2-3 seconds in my cycle, and often wastes 5-8 seconds for the other bots. In other words, every robot can play defense, even when running gears.