When my team was discussing possible match strategies for CRESCENDO, we threw around the idea of having a robot that would pick up pieces from the source, get right outside the opposing wing, and then shoot the pieces towards the home speaker. This would be done until there was a pile of 5-6 notes in front of the speaker, and then when the amplification is activated our alliance would be able to score 2-3 notes per bot in the speaker while amplified instead of 1 each amplification with regular cycling. My gut feeling is that this would be legal, but there are two rules that this could be interpreted as violating.
G406 - “ROBOTS may not deliberately use GAME PIECES in an attempt to ease or amplify challenges associated with FIELD elements.”
Gathering notes to score rapid-fire during amplification may not be intended and “ease” the challenge of the game.
G409 - “In TELEOP, a ROBOT may neither…have greater-than-MOMENTARY CONTROL of more than 1 NOTE, either either directly or transitively through other objects, while outside their SOURCE ZONE.”
Having a group of notes by your speaker, potentially being defended from opposing alliance stealing, could be interpreted as controlling them.
The strategy described appears to be normal gameplay. As long as you’re able to shoot the notes within 3 seconds of picking it up, there shouldn’t be any trouble with holding 2 at a time. (Just make sure you have a moment in there where you’re holding only 1; if you pick up a third before shooting, I don’t think the momentary resets. You’ll probably want to nail down the rule behavior with q&a before committing.)
However, keep in mind that your opponents will very likely try to steal from or otherwise defend or mess up your pile, effectively wasting your setup time. Given that, I legitimately don’t know whether, this strategy will be better than regular cycling with opportinustic amplification.
I think this is legal, I don’t think this is effective if the other team sees what’s happening as they’ll disrupt it. Even if you protect the pile if they stay long enough when you amp it you will not be able to shoot all of the pieces if any when the amplification occurs. If you tried to do this out of nowhere as a surprise for an attempt to clutch a game I suppose it could work by shooting in from of the speaker. But this also assumes with 2-3 notes per bot that every bot has a decent ground intake and a decent shooter if you have a well rounded alliance to be able to pull the strategy off in the first place, you probably won’t need it to win in quals all of the time if you just opportunistically amp, saving this for close matches may be ideal. If you don’t have all well rounded bots you may need to modify the strategy a little bit the concept is still there, your prediction could be accurate but it could be much lower in general or per bot as to how many pieces are shot in this period. I think it’s possible but it will take a lot of coordination which is easier said than done. Consider if shooting the notes directly in front of the speaker is what you want if you change the position you drop the notes you may find this strategy more effective and less easy to counter.
This could be a great strategy to do with one extra note at a time as the pile would only be 3 large instead of like 6 or 9 large. Now this strategy is very easy to defend against as ash said. This feels more like a strategy you want to test the opposing alliance with to see if they are paying attention to your alliance or not. If you see the other alliance doing this, stealing the other alliances notes can be faster than going over to your source so it is incredibly risky to do this as you are helping the other alliance if they are paying attention. But this does increase your average points gained per cycle by around 25%, depending on pick up time, it could also increase the average time per cycle. I wouldn’t base your robot on this strategy though as if you do, other teams might catch on and everyone knows to steal your notes.
Obviously the strategy is rudimentary right now and has counters, but I see it as being very effective in a lot of situations. The notes being by the speaker would make them barely, if at all, faster to pick up for the opposing alliance than simply going to their source, so I feel like they’d only intentionally steal them if they noticed the strategy, and a lot of the time they might not notice. Even if they were stealing, shooting the notes across could probably be done faster than the opposing alliance could steal them, especially if 2 bots are shooting notes across. Even if it only allows 2 shots per bot per amp, that’s essentially 2 amplification power - ups in one.
Agreed, I love your teams thinking and it’s a strat I’d imagine many teams are considering. I think if you put more thought in to optimize it and this is partially what will happen over the course of the competition weeks, you will have a solid strat. With this in mind, I would say if your shooter can shoot from midfield to around your speaker great. However, I would say if you really focus on making your shooter shoot far and you have to sacrifice other parts of gameplay to continue to shoot far I would advise against it. I do think you could pull it off without limiting any other parts of gameplay, but I can’t tell you for certain if this would be a problem. There is a video of a certain shooter configuration that seemed to shoot far and pretty accurate I could try and find again for you if you’d like. I will also warn be sure your shooter is consistent and precise as you don’t want to be shooting notes out of the field, and if you shoot over the stage this is more likely to happen.
All of this makes perfect sense. It’s definitely not something to base our whole bot around, but the ability to do it seems like it could be worth doing. Once comps roll around it’ll be exciting to see how strategies evolve through the season
G414 No full-court shots. A ROBOT with any part of its BUMPERS in their opponent’s WING may not cause
NOTES to travel into or through their WING.
Violation: FOUL, plus TECH FOUL for subsequent violations in the MATCH.
My variant of that strategy, sit under the source and put all 45 rings in the center. Then watch absolute chaos ensue. (Think 2017 fuel balls)
At the end, I think you can Kool-Aid man the whole pile into your zone too, as long as they all stop moving within 3 seconds of you touching them.
I have wondered if that would break G406, while you didn’t directly stack the pieces to amplify the game, basically making a pseudo-wall that you have to drive around kinda did amplify the challenge of the game.
