Be sure to hang in as short a time frame as possible. This maximizes the time before your hang that you can be scoring/descoring tubes. If you look at 2010 FRC Breakaway, teams that could maximize the amount of time they had before needing to hang (1114 Simbotics and 67 HOT come to mind) were able to keep scoring until a good 10-15 seconds longer than slower hanging robots, and this gave them a huge advantage.
I can’t say for sure, but a low-accuracy mechanism would probably be effective for intake/pickup. As in Clean Sweep, 254a-esque robots only had to touch the ball and it was in the basket, and that gave them an edge. A bit of patient programming should make the depositing operations equally easy for the drivers.
Defensive play? With what I’m inclined to call “physical” defense, you’re keeping the opponent from the posts, and implies a sturdy, high torque robot with excellent driving. With descoring-oriented defense, you’re always one step behind your opponent, but can be just as effective (especially if you can pull off a quick hang or have autonomous advantage…).
Win autonomous! By the time worlds comes around, this’ll probably be easier said than done, but if you can high hang (+20) or score (+7) in autonomous, you’ll likely get the 10 point edge as well as a morale boost.
Another crazy idea that just came to my mind was to play strictly for ensuring goal possession. I was just thinking perhaps you could put the minimum necessary for ownership on each of the 5 movable goals (if you’re fast, you should only need 5 tubes total), and then carry them around. Automatic 5*7=35 points. If you have a strong alliance partner, hopefully who can descore and score efficiently on wall posts, or perhaps hang, then you’ve pretty much guaranteed wins every time.
All that sounds good… I like the idea of hanging in autonomous mode… Have fun getting the programming up too that level…
I would say the key is to be able to score fast, and score up too 5 rings at a time. Maybe some sort of conveyor system? Like my team (177) had for QQ? (if you remember that far back… :P)
I would definitely say hanging is too valuable to miss out on. Maybe create a way for you to help your alliance partner hang as well?
Just a few thoughts…
I still say the best way to hang is to create a helicopter that can sit on top of the ladder…
While I’m glad you’re thinking much more strategically than the average Vex battler, a lot of the conclusions here are fairly obvious.
Hanging as fast as possible is a quick conclusion. Most game objectives you want to do as fast as possible. Bonus points are also almost always good, so winning autonomous could be an advantage.
The game has a few intricacies though that make strategy far less simple. What can you do in autonomous if you ignore attempting to get the autonomous bonus? How quickly do you have to low / high hang to have a higher payoff than scoring / descoring on the ground? THESE are the key strategic decisions you have to figure out for yourself. They’re risky. And you’ll probably be wrong about at least one major thing. But they are key.
and most of that is decided on how good your opponent is, so you wouldnt know until you play them
a note to number 5?
on top of owning and dragging around 5 goals, you can also camp at one of the wall posts so you own 6…
Not exactly.
If you pick up 2/3rds of the rings, the max they can score is still 1/3rd. If you can’t outscore whatever rings you don’t pick up, you lose regardless of opponent skill.
In terms of defense, I predict that early in the season the more effective form of defense will be bot-on-bot walling (have your weaker scoring bot wall their stronger one and hope the other of your robots can win 1v1). As we get later in the season and people figure out incredible ways of removing scored tubes from goals, that will become more valuable (since if your robot is awesome enough your “negative output” for the other team can be greater than the positive output that of their stronger scoring robot, whereas with physical walling it is at best equal).
High hang will win at Worlds. However, I’d be willing to bet that the end of each match is going to turn into a huge game of chicken between teams that can all hang high… the team that hangs high first is assured of 20 points, but if they go too early they risk having those canceled by the opposition just regularly scoring. It’ll be important to get a feel for exactly how fast your opponent’s best robot can score and then making sure that the time it takes them to own three goals is more than the amount of time before the end of the match that you hang.
With a quick point analysis, this seems to be the case. But with any analysis of scoring, there may be other factors in play other than what the manual spells out. Perhaps for your design, this is the case, but for all possible designs?
Also, keep in mind when making this analysis that it is very easy to overestimate the number of points your robot will score. Revisiting the analysis after prototyping and figuring out how quickly a practiced driver can reasonably score with your design may be of benefit to you. In FRC this year, many teams decided not to go for 2 bonus points because they believed they could score 2 additional game pieces in a 20 second period. Yet, many teams struggled to score even 10 points, or 1 piece every 12 seconds. The teams that correctly modeled the number of extra points they could score by ignoring the secondary objective had the most success this year. Obviously you can’t copy and paste attributes from a robot soccer game to a ring scoring game but it demonstrates the need for accurate analysis.
To play devils advocate many frc teams who talked about the hang or don’t hand decision though about the fact that if other robots tried to hang they would have fewer opposing robots in their way and preventing them from scoring. How many points you score in the time before the bonus is irrelevant if the defense robot leaves to hang any you have two open nets er um chains.
Sometimes you don’t know how good your opponent is, even after you play them, and it is not a constant if they get better with practice/luck or worse with stress/unreliability of the moment.
The line of analysis below is aiming for the win regardless of opponents actions.
This looks like an inverted logic error:
Contrary Example: If I can score only 1 of my tubes (thus not outscoring the 1/3rd of tubes still on the ground), I can win against a brick-bot,
but lose to a team that can score 2 tubes; so it still depends on their skill.
When the phrase is inverted/reversed, it seems more true:
If you CAN outscore whatever tubes you don’t pickup,
you can WIN regardless of opponent skill;
For example: If I can score 1/3 of tubes + 1 tube, I can win against even a team that can score all the available (1/3 I didn’t pickup) tubes.
(but only if we ignore auton bonus, hang bonus, distribution of scoring tubes across goals which determines goal ownership bonus)
I started some analysis along these lines, rather than building robots,
using 8 nested for loops representing Auton winner, Red hanging outcomes, red goals owned, red tubes score, red pickup of blue tubes, blue goals owned, blue tubes scored, blue hanging outcomes:
Assumptions, 4-5 tubes max per goal, no weird sidestacking,
3,291K cases evaluated
73K non-trivial lines output
685 scores where Red wins, despite the otherwise best efforts of blue, as discussed above
Best match: Rg05_t22_B_HH vs Bg04_t19_B_HH R109 to B108,
Examples that show my current logic doesn’t work perfectly:
1: Rg05_t12_st00_R_HH beats Bg04_t19_R_HH R99 to R98
If blue can stack 20 tubes in 4 stacks 5 high, or otherwise score some on the red owned goals, they can still win, so red would need at least st03.
2: red g09_t09_st00_B_ wins with 63 points,
but it is unlikely that blue will not put a single tube on a goal.
The problem is that I’m unrealisticly assuming mono-colored goals.
My point, which I believe he misinterpreted, was that you need to know how fast your opponent’s robot can score, because if you hang too early they can nullify your hang by regular scoring even if they can’t hang once you’re up there. If they can own three goals in less time than is remaining in the match, hanging is inadvisable. Basically, whoever has the fastest high hang gets a big advantage as long as they can own three goals in the same amount of time it takes their opponent to hang. Thus it’ll be important to know exactly how long it takes your opponents to hang.
The thing is though, if you spend your time building a high-hanging mechanism, and you get to a competition only to find out that most competent robots can own multiple goals faster than you can hang, then your hanging would probably be rendered useless. Unless you can hang in less than 5 seconds, my bet would be that you’re better off in attempting to optimize your tube scoring mechanism.
High Hanging is guaranteeing 20 points, if you use 10 seconds hanging but you could score 22 points in that 20 seconds it still could be worth hanging because opponents are unable to “de-score” those points
If your opponent can cause as great a point swing scoring as they can descoring, it wouldn’t matter whether you can or cannot descore hanging points.
But that’s a good point, and it comes down to the coach to judge whether hanging or scoring would cause a bigger point swing. A circumstance I’m imagining is, for example, your opponents can’t descore, and all goals are already occupied, then hang. If only 5 goals are occupied, than stay down and score. Something like that.
Of course, you want to keep in mind that in any case it’s what your own robot can do, not your alliance. I’m having trouble imagining a single robot (not an alliance) causing more than 20 point swing in about 20 seconds or less by scoring/descoring. That would mean changing possession of approximately 3 goals (depending on if you reverse possession or merely neutralize, as well as if you score/descore tubes that don’t affect goal possession)
This is an extremely valid point that people have to consider. I feel compelled to add another though. What if your hanging attempt is defended somehow? Will you be able to high hang if others are up there too?
There are also situations where you could get more points by focusing purely “on the ground” than by building a hybrid. Tradeoffs will need careful consideration by teams this year.
I think the more competitions there are the more the dynamic of the game will change. In the beginning at least, I think that the robots that focus “on the ground” will do better off, but by the end, there will obviously be hybrids that are extremely dangerous.
What Chris_is_me said though is very valid – what if someone already hung or is defending you from hanging. You would be wasting time trying to hang which you could be using to score tubes.
If you use the last twenty seconds to score tubes though, even if it’s only 22 points compared to 20 points, there’s still very little to no time for the other alliance to descore them, so, depending on the circumstances, it might be beneficial to score tubes instead of hanging.
rather than building robots,