So, I read the official rules and I am still struggling on one part, can you hang in autonomous?
You can hang in auton. The points for hanging will contribute to the autonomous bonus, but they will not carry over to the final score.
Are you completely sure? My team had told me it doesn’t count for the autonomous score
I dont think anybody will know until the official rules come out but as of right now it will count.
Yes you can. The rules do not say you can’t, therefore it is legal. It is the same as in Toss Up. Most teams won’t do it because it is hard to make a hanging mechanism that can easily be retracted.
And that wouldn’t waste time at the beginning of the match to get down. I honestly don’t think hanging in auto is all that great of an idea because of the other alliance gets all of the stars on the fence to your side, you will have to send more stars back to their side to even out the match
You are forgetting that AP is important in ranking, and the autonomous bonus represents the only permanent points in the game; everything else is back-and-forth. I don’t think it would be hard to catch up with the stars in most early tournaments, either.
If we can get all of the stars to the other side that are on the fence, and our partner (let’s say a pushbot) pushes a few from the 2 pt zone to the 1 pt zone, we still have a chance at winning auto. That is assuming the alliance partner of the hanging team does little to nothing 
I don’t think it’s too much to shoot a couple stars on the way to hang (preload, and the star in the corner).
If you have a fast lift, I could suggest lifting in auton… Since we have a lift that extends and lifts our robot in 3 seconds, we might consider lifting in auton.
It depends on how fast your robot can unlift and how many points per second you make…
If 4/[time it takes you to unlift] > [your points per second] then you should lift in autonomous
You’ve built your robot already???
In fact, you may WANT the stars to be on your side until the last bit of game play.
I thought so as well. On reconsideration, it may be too difficult to fire that many large, heavy objects in quick succession. This may also sacrifice the hang as well. So I don’t think largescale hoarding will be a main strategy.
Good points. I’m very excited to see the different strategies teams come up with to cope with this game. Do I sense another Lemon Bots “tether bot/wall bot” of sorts?? @Aponthis ?
As fun as it would be to stoke some hype or something, no. I’ve looked into it, but you just can’t fit enough robot into an 18-inch cube to have a solid wall that is 12 feet wide and 5-6 feet tall, not to mention one that still allows partners to score at the same time. It’s simply not practical.
As for a tether bot, I would rather just have one good/fast robot. I don’t think a tether bot is worthwhile either.
As for the legality of hanging in auton, I think that’s 100% okay as long as you realize that you will not be immediately awarded the 12 points, but only the 4 point autonomous bonus. You’d have to “relift” by the end of the match to get the 12 points. Personally, I think that there are so many objects on the field in preset positions that hanging can easily be negated by a well-written auton routine. If you can even shoot one star per 3 seconds (I think this is very reasonable), you could start off trying to knock all the fence stars over to opponent side, then just grab a few of the other stars along the field and you win, even negating the lift.
I think once robots are actually done we’ll see a renewed discussion of this though; still a wee bit too early to be writing autonomous code
Can’t say I disagree with you. A true wall bot would be very hard. I do think it would be fun to build a partial wall bot that can move quickly to block the other alliance from getting stars over.
But then does it have the torque to hold up to pushing robots? Or the height to prevent catapults? And how do you block two robots on opposite sides of the field?
Yea, it definitely wouldn’t be perfect. You would be reliant on your partner of course. But if you can block all of the points from one robot and at least slow the other one down, that may be worth while. Remember, in this game, blocking a point is the same thing as scoring a point.
Honestly, I doubt we will even try to build a wall bot. I just get excited thinking about the awesome stuff some of “the great” teams may come up with.