In figure 7-1 it shows that a robot is allowed to sit at a loading station and fire power cells across the field as long as it doesnt cross the other initiation line. Do you guys think it would be good for a robot to shoots balls across the field to save time from robots traveling?
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I mean, you’d have to be accurate enough to shoot into another robot
But if you have 2 254-level teams, maybe it’s possible for one to sit at the wall and the other to sit in front and just spam
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I wouldn’t say “into” another robot. I’d be thinking about grounding it near them so they can slurp it up.
Plausible, but unlikely is my vote here.
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Im thinking more of shoot it to that area and not directly into a robot, it would ofc depend if your alliance mates had a way to pick up power cells off the floor or not
Might be more of a “our drivetrain is about to break” strategy
I wouldn’t build my robot entirely around doing this, but I think there is certainly value in being able to load 5 balls from the human player station and pass them across the field. I would check out how 125 played at IRI in 2012 for a similar strategy.
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g9 A ROBOT whose BUMPERS are fully contained by their SECTOR may not
cause POWER CELLS to travel into or through their opponent’s SECTOR.
it looks like you can do it as long as it stops before the sector zone on the other side of the field
It’s plausible, but I don’t think it will be good. Much of the cycle time is picking up the balls, so I don’t think any but the most accurate pass would be more efficient than two cyclers.
But wouldn’t it stop your alliance from having to go across the field to collect power cells
might be good to pass and play defense maybe?
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Possibly. But the problem is that they have to slurp these things off the ground, which isn’t know to be easy or hard. (And “easy” vs “hard” isn’t objective… it’s also team-dependent.)
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Yeah, I guess it’s better to keep it as a possibility and strategize with other teams during competition rather than focus on it for strategy
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If we are comparing it back to 2012, having a hopper and you having a reliable shooter while your teammates lob a ball into the hopper could be a very effective strategy.
If your alliance had a robot that could camp out in the power port lined up for the 3 point shot, being able to feed it would in fact be a useful strategy. You wouldn’t design your robot around the concept of being the feeding robot but if you did design a 3 point shooter you would be silly not to consider how another alliance partner could feed you.
Even with a robot lined up, the 3 point shot is going to be slow, each ball has to clear the target and drop down or the next one will bounce back out. The cadence of that shot is probably in the .500 to 1.2500 second range. You can shotgun into the one point goal or machine gun into the 2 point goal, but the 3 point shot is going to require finesse and accuracy beyond the capability of 90% of teams.
In short it’s a good strategy, but you better have more to offer than just that.
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Here they are loading up balls and then taking long shots, a few of which go in but most of which feed the other alliance members nearby.
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I agree with the main point of your analysis, and I think that feeding may be a niche, but not dominant strategy.
I don’t think shooting the ball into the three point goal accurately while partially inside the target zone will be common even among the very best teams. I’ve done some basic calculations, and a 45 inch tall shooter would have to be around 60 inches back from the wall for the trajectory into the back goal to be possible (i.e. without hitting the wall), and then the robot would have to be perfectly accurate (I did assume the ball would be at it’s apex when it enters the goal). This is possible, but only just, and you can’t be pressed up against the wall, so it might not be worth the lining up overhead.
I might make a post about this if I can put into a more presentable form, but here’s a desmos graph. h_1 is the height of the back goal, h_2 is the height of the bottom of the front goal, r is the radius of the ball, and m is the distance the two goals. The parabola represents how tall you have to be to make a shot at a given distance.
Passing was extra valuable in Stronghold over defenses when teams were limited to one boulder and had a similar long journey. Now that teams can carry five cells with no significant defense other the other alliance bots , its less valuable IMO as its hard to pass five and might waste extra time versus delivering the unit score. But see what works and test it out.
In 2012, a small subset of teams made a living firing basketballs across the field to their offense-minded partners.
Is it practical in most cases? No. Is it doable with the right setup? Yes.
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