I think that you can probably do 3 but whoever first said 4 points less thought you could only do 2.
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Our thought is if we are going to build for the Deep Cage, it has fast to stage and near guaranteed success to make the time/space investment worth it.
How many cycles are you giving up to make the deep cage climb? Ranking points are important, but only during Qualification. For elims you have to factor in lost cycles for the time it takes you to climb.
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Sure. Although the longer explanation is important context for you original post. This is also super dependent on robot architecture (e.g. cycling to G or H at L3/4 is likely to take longer).
Cycling efficiency decreases as the match progresses as well, by virtue of pieces being scored and taking up space. So I cation against seeing a 7 second everybot cycle and extrapolating.
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If i had to guess, a deep cage would be equivalent to 3-4 cycles by that point in the game. So if you can climb faster than you can get that many cycles, deep climb is worth it. Even for elims.
Not only does efficiency decrease, but cycle value decreases as the higher levels fill up too. So while a deep climb at the beginning of the match when L4 still has spots open might be worth less than 3 cycles, by the end of the match if you’ve filled L3 and L4 then a deep climb is now worth 4 cycles. If you fill L2-3-4, a deep climb is worth an astounding 6 cycles since your only remaining scoring location is the trough! The practical result of this is that you can justify spending more time to line up and execute your climb the more coral you score.
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Hello from MN, our team last year realized that we could score in trap from the ground consistently and we even had an auto to do 3 trap but that had issues do to poor April tag positioning on our stage, but being able to score trap from ground was pretty valuable to us
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6 L1 coral cycles. Remains 3 algae cycles as long as there is still algae available to score 
if
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hot take:
you should not be doing L2-L4 if you:
- don’t have vision capabilities/are actively not working towards them
and/or - will not have time for drive practice due to the complexity of design/fabrication/assembly/programming or limited meeting time
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AprilTags or game piece detection?
Apriltags! For the drivetrain’s side-to-side alignment to the reef.
(Front-back alignment should be driver driving right into the reef’s flat edge.)
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You should look at the rev starter bot. The robot isn’t using vision and can score L2 and L3 pretty effectively. It’s harder to score without vision but it can be done. Honestly I’d argue for some teams it’s more important to do drive practice than get vision working.
Drive practice is pretty important for all things. I think that can be said for any mechanism every year. It’s best to have drive practice to tune the robot before real field time.
There will be plenty of robot designs that teams can build and modify that can do L2 and L3. Everybody hasn’t even come out yet and I’m sure they’ll be able to score more than a kitbot.
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Yep, through drive practice. But if your team decides to go for L2-L4 even tho:
you will likely not have enough/any drive practice to maximize your L2-L4 scoring capability.
The alternative is to go for a simpler design (like L1 only and algae, maybe even climb) that you CAN finish in time and get plenty of drive practice with.
While you definitely can score L2-L4 without vision, the lining up is going to be difficult and time consuming, especially when you are trying to score on the back of the reef. On the fly path generation / localization with April Tags is going to be a huge separator this year, even more so than it usually is.
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Sorry, if I made it sound like I said vision is not needed this year. I do think it is needed for higher levels of play.
Id agree that the teams who win events will have vision. You’re right, vision is important for alignment.
I was arguing that a low resource team could make it to playoffs (probably 5th-8th alliance) without vision. Especially at week 1 events. Later in the season robots get good, so vision becomes almost a requirement to win a match in playoffs.
I honestly think Swerve kitbot will be the way to go for team with less resources (or even middle-tire teams)
2 cycles of Coral on L1 gives you the same points for 1 cycle on L3. (4 points)
But I think swerve kitbot can use half the time to put a coral on L1 compared to [superstructure extendout] + [drivetrian align] for scoring a coral on L4.
Based on 4481’s testing here with not ideal driving (due to software issues), they can still get around 11 cycles per game, averaging 10 seconds per cycle.
10 second per cycle is actually impressive for FRC game.
Edit: i didn’t consider RP in this lol
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I feel like defense robots could have a huge impact this year. Cycles this year will be extremely fast, and just a single defending robot could cause great increases in cycle times. Over so many cycles the effect would cause a massive impact in points prevented.
The lack of any safe zones surrounding the sources makes defense very powerful against coral scoring bots. And from what I see in the game manual, there is nothing preventing robots from blocking the coral station.
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