So there’s been a lot of talk about descore bars being used to nullify high caps. With other teams able to take out high caps easily, is it even worth dedicating motors to placing the caps on the posts?
Me and the rest of my team think no. From our experimentation, it takes much longer to score a high cap than anything else worth the same points on the field, and in doing so you’re literally setting your opponent up to take those points down. And that’s not to mention the extra motors you get from not having a lift. To be honest, I would even question the viability of a descoring arm- those who score high caps are putting themselves at such a strategic disadvantage you probably don’t even need to descore the cap.
likely not, this isnt a game like itz or nbn where theres a limited availability of points.
All points can be switched so you’ll usually have something to do and high cap scoring happens to take up the most time
the best utilization would probably be in autonomous if you are on the square away from the flags but even then, it it really worth building?
If you are planning on competing in skills doing high caps can get you +4pts to your combined total. So if you want to do skills, you should at least consider it. The only issue is with motor limits finding a good way to do this that doesn’t “waste” a motor.
I think that if your shooter is sub-par, then you kind of need to go with high caps. They’re one of the highest scoring game objects, and if your alliance partner gets in the way while shooting, you’ll need to go do something else while they use their two balls up.
For a newer team, I think caps are a good choice, though. In my experience, shooters are much harder to build than lifts. But when you get past about State/Regionals, they’ll become kind of redundant.
I personally believe that caps will be an effective option for at least your first competition. If a lot of teams attempt to score balls, which is normally harder to perfect than a lift, then you will have an advantage in the first competition. Also descoring robots are effective but if you get good at driving, then while the descorer is “descoring” then you can try to score new caps while the opposing alliance is doing so. Finally if the opposing descoring robot is descoring, then they wont be trying to score, giving you a chance to gain points. Although this is totally object-able, it is what I believe is the way to do well in turning point.
I mean, if its not any trouble scoring high caps, and you don’t need to go out of your way to be able to, then go for it, but If you’d have to make major modifications to your lift to score there, then I say just go for low caps and balls. But if you are planning on making a mostly cap-oriented bot, then it might be a necessity. My team hasn’t yet built our lift, we’re building our flywheel first, and building our lift so if fits nicely around that, so we don’t know if we’re going for high caps.
yup, our team is planning on building our lift first, due to the simplicity of it. Last year one big reason our robot wasn’t at its full potential was due to the lack of driving expertise. If he had more time to practice that, we would have been better.
Last year, I think we spent too much time driving. I got to a point where I didn’t have to think when I drove at all, but it was the actual speed of the bot that constrained me. This year, I have much more building time, and practice time, and a whole field, so I should come up with a much better bot.
I don’t ever speak of the monstrosity that was my starstruck bot.
It may end up easier to take out flags than caps for many teams. Scoring a cap will be an annoyance to another team that is trying to control flags, or has dedicated themselves to only balls.
Caps will have a place, especially if teams convince themselves that they won’t.
+1
this video discusses having robots defend the 3 posts on your side by preventing robots from passing to your side with a flag shooting robot and a cap scoring with full field capabilities.
although by playing defense, you cant play offense so they have their 3 posts as well but this could be effective against a team with no lifts
There are only 33 non-parking points available to be scored between 17 objects. 15 of those come from 9 flags, 14 come from 8 caps, and 4 come from the single autonomous bonus. If you ignore caps or flags, you’re ignoring about half of the possible non-parking points. Put another way, the highest score possible for one Alliance is 45. Caps are 31% of that total. Put yet another way, a score of 29 always wins. Caps are 48% of that total.
Based on the breakdown of points, I’d predict that the best robots will be generalists with a heavy emphasis on autonomous efficacy and parking supremacy. A +6 advantage in parking points plus the autonomous bonus means you only need 10 of the remaining 29 cap or flag points to secure victory. A robot that ignores any scoring type entirely will find itself hard-pressed to keep a generalist bot from finding 10 points somewhere.
tl;dr caps will probably be important, as will every other way of scoring
Good analysis.
But just thought of putting in an analysis from another approach (i.e. for the specialised robots).
If a team decides to build a specialised robot (either specialises in flag or cap), it is winnable as well.
Eg. Cap-specialist
- Score all the caps - 14 points
- Park at centre platform - 6 points
Ignoring the alliance platforms (which will cancelled out each other), the opponent will only score a max of 15 points (from the flags).
It will be similar analysis if it is a flag-specialist.
So that means, in order to be a specialist, there are 2 main conditions to guarantee a win:
- the robot must secured all the caps (or flags)
- the robot must secured the centre platform
I do like this game, simply because there are many ways of winning the game 
The thing with that is descoring arms. You can not score caps while still keeping your opponent from finding 10 easy points. However, I can agree with the importance of autonomous. I think the best solution is to use a 1 mtr lift with no rotator. This will allow you to get caps in auton and during skills while still not wasting your motor power.
I don’t understand making a cap descoring arm. It makes much more sense to just build a one motor cap lift, and then you can score points by flipping the cap instead of descoring it. When you descore it you don’t even know if it will land with your color up. You can build a one motor dr4b with either 393 or V5 that can pick up a cap, and you can also have a passive flipper.
Weight, space, and time are why a lot of teams won’t do it. My bet is by worlds we’ll see bots that don’t even have descoring arms paired with bots that have a 1 mtr lift and maybe a rotator.
I guess, but I think that if you have good build quality weight and space need not be an issue. I do agree with everyone here though that the first person to have to score a cap to the high position will be at a disadvantage.
Again, the main problem is time. My team spent half the summer trying to make a non dr4b mechanism that could reach a high post- it was a disaster, and it’s why we won’t be doing high caps until we get a solid backup bot.
I see what you are saying now. I also just remember that since the gear boxes for V5 haven’t arrived yet it is hard to gauge if something will work well with one motor.
It also depends on if you are trying to make a dr4b that is as wide as the robot or only on one side.