Quick wall concept and strategy from team 81818 - base level design (far from full) with wheels and a lock for an easy deployment.
As of now wallbots are legal - if opponent’s balls are not by the perimeter and an opponent is not close (distance yet to be said by the GDC), the balls do not count as possessed. I hope it stays this way (if matches don’t become boring), as walls shake up the already formed meta and beating a wall with another wall or with a counterbot is an interesting challenge (drive IVTs :), hoarders).
Some potential upgrades to the wall (besides the obvious stuff like more using boxed steel, having boxed joints, flip out anti-tips, using locked omnis instead, etc):
Panels in the field perimeter to prevent balls from rolling into the possession range
A one way gate/ramp so teammate compatibility isn’t necessary for an autonomous deployment
A segment that blocks the goal your alliance owns own on the middle line
So if your home goals are not filled completely a lift or a snail could score over that wall. That design in particular looks very light and flexible which means that almost any robot could just push the wall all the way back to the goals and finish them if they are not full before you deploy your wall.
Yeah you could do this if you really wanted to. There are a lot of free spaces on snail bots that can be used to store a wall. The only issue I see is that the tether could easily wrap around the center goal which could be ruled as grappling the field based off of some of the Q and A answers regarding cages.
The issue with this wall is that
A) I think that, unless you make it stronger, it can be bent/broken
B)I think it will be easily pulled away from the goals
On that note, yeah, based on the video, some tweaking is needed to be stronger. However, A lot of teams do very well by just tipping the wall over so it is harder to break. 81N in my region, did this and never had it break. It is just a different strain put on it. It works.
@Kyle1 it seems you are new to the community, I recommend you look at AURA’s 15" robot from 2015. Amazing team, amazing robot. They had a scissor lift and if you did something similar, this strategy could totally work.
And do also note that this match was during 393 motor era.
And now we are talking about V5 motors…
I will count my teams as a veteran of wallbots as well - building walls since Skyrise
So yes - definitely there are many ways to strengthen the wall.
Edit: @Kyle1 - just some advice regarding wallbot - to have an effective wallbot, you need to do a proper and thorough game analysis to see how and when you should deploy the wall. And after that do lots of research on how other successful teams built their walls.
Building a good wallbot is actually more technically challenging than the usual meta bot.
But it is fun
the most effective wall that I see realistically happening is either a 12 foot wall that you pop right after auton that blocks your opponents in their side of the field, and then you fill up the central row completely so they can’t score. this is very difficult to pull off though, and it can be defeated if your opponents zoom onto your side really fast, which ruins everything.
another option could be to wall off one of your corners with a little wall, fill it up, and then you fill up the center goal and guard it, while your partner fills up one of the other corners and guards that. If on top of this you can win auton, this is a pretty good option, but of course it isn’t unstoppable, your opponents aren’t just going to sit there and take the loss, they’ll try their hardest to push you away from the goals you’re guarding, so you’d need to be very defense resilient.
I just don’t think 12 foot wall is worth it tbh, very difficult to pull off.
I’m not sure the space on your robot is worth it. For a defensive play it is cool though. It guarantees you some points if you’re good at auto. I’m not saying this is meta but it’s cool. Wall bots are always cool in my opinion.
