What kind of stratagies in robots, and game play are you all seeing this year? Things like descoring only, while your teamate does all the scoring? Has the high goal been a major factor? What kind of robots have you seen that have good stratagies with them? Was there a stratagy you expected to see that you haven’t yet?
High goal is mainly only scored by pre-loads (just a couple that I have seen can score it regularly)
Good strategies involve filling up the troughs early and keep adding because the other team will be too busy descoring to focus on scoring very much themselves. Also get on the opponents side of the field and mess up THEIR strategy. Try to get a pile from their side to shake them up and confuse them. 
ignore the middle 2 troughs because theyll get descored anyways
focus on your side trough with one protecting at all times, and then robot 2, has enough to dump, they swap places so theres a “mega pile” in the side trough
getting on their side to create “chaos” is a good one as well due to the field layout
still waiting for a “good” high goal scorer…
In our tournaments, the strategy has basically been to score everything you can in the troughs during the first half of the match. Then, descore everything the opponent has. In the last 15 seconds or so, plop a stack of 6 on the high goal.
So unless your opponent can’t descore, most of your points in the trough will end up gone anyways. A lot of the time, it’s the high goal that determines the winner.
Right now there is getting a lot more of the “descoring” battles. I agree with murdomeek on filling up the side trough. That way you have 1 wall at your side to work with.
We also like filling up a trough and “puppy-guarding” it. If you get enough sacks into one, just protect it. We like getting out high goal points up early so we can focus on the troughs after.
My strategy is to win 
But seriously though, most strategies I’ve seen are to load up the troughs with sacks and then, last second, descore the other alliance’s sacks.
Also, most teams will only put the bonus sack(s) on the high goal, as putting one reg. sack is not “worth” as much as doing a couple or more sacks in the trough, time-wise. By putting the bonus sack on the high goal, it is harder for teams to descore that bonus sack.
On a side note, I have a story from an adventure with the high goal. I’ll summarize in a couple sentences and it won’t sound as epic-ly funny (and sad) as it was, but here goes: so our robot was going through the qualification matches, doing pretty well. Anyway, we get to this one match and we decide we want to try to put a sack on the high goal (we really “finished” the robot during pre-inspection, as it was first competition of our season). So we go in and we dump two sacks, and as our scoring mechanism was returning to it’s normal position, it flips one of the sacks up and over the divider, scoring one for the other alliance. So, in the end we had did all that to nullify our score. Sigh… never going to see that again (in both a good way and a bad way)
Our bot managed to do something like that while working on a “gold in high” autonomous,in practice thankfully.
Some VERY preliminary data I have been analyzing suggests that as one might expect sacks in high goals tends to win matches. What is interesting is that placing regular sacks in high may have more impact on chances of winning than bonus sacks.
Much of that may be due to gold sack scarcity but in many of the matches analyzed so far less than 4 regular sacks were scored high anyway. Other early analysis seems to confirm that winning autonomous bonus, and parking bonus, even have a high correlation to winning.
I need to enter a boat load of more data to be able to say for sure, but it seems to suggest that the best strategy is just what you would expect in roughly evenly matched alliances: Win autonomous, score high and try for parking.
Stan
and were your analizations of vids of competitions globally? regional? continental?
because NZ’s usually has different gamepley than from the west coast region for example
To start with I am looking at US east cost matches, where I live. That will allow me to see if my own personal observations match what the raw data shows.
I’m using the data in the excel csv exports now on robot events. I will need to write a program to analyze the amount of data available on a global scale. That is why I stress the data is preliminary.
Who knows what other observations are buried, waiting to be data mined. One disadvantage of the data available is there is no obvious way to account for defensive descoring play.
Stan
the stratige that my new team will be using is we go for the bonus sacks under the troughs first then gather up a lot of sacks and score them at once .And if you are going to score in the high goal what is the point of making a 6 bar or 8 bar .Make something small but also have some way to score on the high goal .What my team is doing is we are going to have a platform where we place our sacks and a moter pushes it forword making our prelouds score in the high goal.
Why not use pneumatics for that? The extra motors are useful for your lift and drive.
Score, Score, Score and descore both of the opponents troughs in the last 15 seconds 
any more “complex” or “robot specific” strategies guys?
9’ Trough-capper with a scoring minibot?
Perhaps not ones that teams want to give out…
my personal strategy is to score the pre-load on autonomous, and try to intake a sack as well, the score like 5-6 sacks, then go under trough and try to block/descore goals …
and if the teams for some reason dont score, dont bother going under, and score loads of sacks