we are really new to vex
what is the best game strategy this year?
- Go on the internet and VEX forum. Do a lot of research and see what other people are sharing.
- Crack the game manual. Make sure you understand each single bit of detail and know how to rule each single situation. Go to official Q&A to ask questions about the rules. Research before you ask.
- Decide what focus you want to pursue. Cube bot? Skyrise stacker? Omni-functional bot? Push bot? Wall bot? etc.
- Come up with a plan about the competition robot. The more detailed you design, the more likely it will work. This includes both structure and program.
- Build it and test it. Make changes and improve it.
- Go to competitions and see where you are.
- Repeat 5 and 6 the entire season.
Competition strategy is not only limited to what you do on the field, which is not everything and does not guarantee you a success. The best strategy overall is to always be passionate to learn, improve and teamwork.
Cheers, pal
First, welcome to the forum…Irish!
There are several things to consider…
Rookie season?
Middle school or high school?
If you are starting for scratch, I would watch 1 or 2 hours of Youtube videos with your whole team(maybe an informal design/strategy party at a team members house):)
on Vex Skyrise matches. Observe the different styles of robots and strategies. Depending on your building capabilities/ideas, fabricate a design of a simple bot that you think will be competitive in your local area.(competitiveness differs from area to area) and as the season progresses, so should your robot. It should be an evolving process of improvements. NO TEAM EVER;)
ends the season with the same robot they built at the beginning of the season. You will find out what works and doesn’t work for your driving and scoring style.
You don’t have understand every single bit of the manual/regulations to formulate a strategy.
Make sure you don’t forget to have fun your rookie season. You will only have one, then it will be game-on from there!
Good Luck!!
This is pretty much the hardest step. To get over this, I suggest
opening up an excel document and graphing all the ways to score and all the ways to prevent someone from scoring. From there, you can see trends in scoring. Figure out which trend gives you the most points for the least amount of work, then optimize your robot towards that one trend. As the season moves on, you can be more ambitious and creative.
Many of those above me have already pointed these out but it must be reinforced,
- Try to be unique. Look on the VEX robotics website and familiarise yourselves with the products available. After this your team should design a robot that meets the requirements you want it to achieve. Then order the parts and hope you designed it thoroughly enough to begin with. (If you try to begin by doing this it will help the students get the most out of the program)
- Hold regular meetings. Our school allows us to participate every lunch and after school. Perhaps this is why our school is arguably one of the top two teams in the UK.
- Get help from other teams. If this is by staying active on the forum, watching youtube videos or by talking to teams. We are always welcome to talk over twitter (@JWS_3116B). There wont be a time problem with you being Irish.
don’t forget to document everything in your engineering notebook, my first year i didn’t realize how important it was until it was too late
i put in information like field object dimensions, sensor data, and sketches for future designs
it is also better to make a robot that can do both cubes and skyrises
even though i was not the best skyrise builder, and was not the best cube scorer i still won because during qualifying matches i was able to build and score a skyrise whether or not i had a good aliance