So throughout competition after competition and match after match drivers have formed certain habits. As you could have guessed by the title, on of these habits that us as drivers have formed is going after cubes as a priority. This is not a all bad thing, but only if you can also get stars with the cube. So as we all know a cube = 2 stars. Most teams can pick up at least 4 stars. why then go back and forth with the cubes all the time, the cubes are much easier to be thrown back, but the stars spread out as soon as they are dumped over. The max (correct me if I am wrong) a robot has picked up is 7 stars (14 points in far or 7 in near) or 3 stars and a cube (5 points in near or 10 in far). Seven stars (also correct me if I am wrong) weighs about 4.9 lbs. Three stars and a cube weighs about 3.3 lbs. So a difference of 1.6 lbs and 2 points. So now that I talked way too much and gave some facts, here is the question: Are cubes worth it?Before you say duh ya, let me elaborate, are cubes worth it when there are many other stars on the field.
See this video to see what I mean if you understand nothing of what I just said, watch at 15secs to about 56secs I am watching the red team.
Not saying that any of the teams in this video are bad, they are great teams with great robots, this is just illustrating my point.
I’m with you. Drivers/coaches should look at the field and go for the highest concentration of scoring objects they can collect, then gather and score. Cubes are like click bait.
First of all, if there are four cubes on one side, it will seriously obstruct each robot’s path. That’s the reason why I personally never let the cube count ever get above 2 on my side.
Second, I guarantee someone has built a robot that can hold every star on the field (not at a competition bot though). My robot can hold 9-10 stars at max.
I feel that cubes are definitely worth going for unless your side is inundated with stars, in which case stars should be the priority.
Cubes are definitely an issue of space. It can be hard for claws to quickly grab stars if there is a cube nearby in the way.
I think their value when considering scoring should be a bit higher than two stars; however, drivers (myself included) definitely give them too much value when making decisions.
Hello, I am the driver for team 53C and at one competition I tunnelled on the cubes so hard that I just lost the match straight up and only by one or two points, if I had realized the 4 stars in the middle we would have won. Today I had a competition and I spent most of the matches throwing stars over because we can pick up 4 and I saved cubes for last because we can do them as fast and throwing the stars over makes it harder for the other team to move around their field.
Yesterday, our first finals match ended in a tie. My alliance (3946E and 3946W) was winning pretty much the entire time except for autonomous, but in the last 10 seconds 1826A and 974X got 3 cubes over and pushed the match to a tie. Footage may go up later. Cubes are not incredibly important, but they are definitely more important than this thread is suggesting.
This seems like a very valid point, cubes be scored very fast and block up your side. This would therefore result in slower star scoring which would make the advantage of scoring the stars negated.
But also going with this, you must look at your opponents strengths vs yours. If your opponent is boss at scoring stars, and dumps more stars than you every time and faster, it would be better to score cubes and block them up, slowing them down, making a possibility of out scoring your opponents in stars.