These are the 2 main strategies that I’ve seen alliances pick for. I’m interested in what everyone in the forums thinks is the preferred strat. I believe Tray Tray is more popular, but Tower and Tray seem to net quite a few points as well. As a tray bot, I want to make sure I’m making the best possible alliance for my team.
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2 trays is less risky, but tray and lift can score more points faster.
I’ve seen lift bots that can stack almost as quickly as trays, stacking about 15 cubes every match as well as doing towers.
A tray and a mediocre tray is better than a tray and a mediocre lift, but a tray and an optimal lift can be really powerful.
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My team won a competition with a combo tray/tower alliance. At the time, our robot didn’t have arms for towers though, so we kind of needed our partner’s tower game
I feel like tray/tray will stay popular because of the great scoring speed and easy tower game with the addition of arms (minus middle tower)
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tray tray is easier to pull off for you and if your strategy is right you’d have almost guaranteed victory in every match assuming there are no mistakes. but the score is generally not as impressive as a good tray lift alliance. you should be clearing the field as a tray tray alliance leaving no cubes for towers.
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if you don’t do skills arms aren’t really necessary
That depends entirely on your opponents. If you can’t descore towers, you’re at a huge disadvantage.
On another note, I think tray + lift bot will be optimal ONLY if the tray bot can score in unprotected during autonomous. Very few teams have the capability to deposit 3 full size stacks (without scoring in autonomous) in one match, and even then it’s cutting close on time. In a competitive match, a tray bot that must do all the stacks will get heavily defended. Otherwise, I see it a viable strategy.
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For robots that can score 6 or more cubes, there should be no reason why robots cannot score towers. If your team does not have a lift, you should be able to intake 5-6 cubes and lower the stack next to a tower and nudge the stack against the tower to where a cube would fall down and into the cup. And when you have enough practice and experience you should be able to pick up the 5 cube stack after to continue intaking more cubes.
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To reiterate, I think this is more important than scoring towers if you’re only a tray bot that doesn’t have a dedicated mechanism for towers.
This is inefficent and susceptible to defense. It’s also not reliable, a stack is not immune to defense by any stretch of the imagination, however intakes can hold a cube firmly in place when going up to drop off in a tower.
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This is correct, but to be honest it does quite depend on the region as well as the purpose. We decided to focus on the stacking and scoring part of the game, but we have the capacity of scoring into the towers if we need to by lowering the stack next to the tower. The reason being is that most of our team is filled with seniors, in which all of us are busy. So by only focusing on one aspect of the game and perfecting it, we can be able to work on the other part as time goes on when we have the capability to do such. This simplifies our life drastically and linearly to create a reliable and solid robot, considering our circumstances. In our second competition, we were able to score in the towers quite quickly, and we have enough practice from the previous competition where we are able to pick the stack we placed right back up to continue stacking.
I will admit that it is not best for teams who have all the time for the world, but for us it fits quite well and it is efficient for our limited time. 
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The main reason I focus on tower play as well is that you can rapidly multiply your points especially if the other team lacks tower ability.
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While this is true, you still have to be able to score a decent amount of cubes or you’ll end up in a situation where no matter how you play colors you still won’t be able to win. I think by worlds tilters are going to get fast enough that they will be able to score all three large stacks fairly quick leaving the rest of the match for color play.
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So, our robot picks up trays, because we are kinda like both.We stack 8 and have a tower arm. We tend to looks for tray, because we have tower, that let us win a comp
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I definitely agree, if you’re fast enough to make massive stacks and do towers, then definitely do that. That said, you could spend the whole match putting up two stacks of 12 but still lose to someone who only made a stack of 6 due to tower play.
Continuing this example, you would have 24 points by the end of the match.
With 3 towers, I would also have 24 points by the end of the match.
Not taking into account the risks of making such a huge stack. By comparison, a stack of 6 is very safe and easy to make. Also any tower play made by me would also benefit my alliance partner by increasing their score, whereas your stacking wouldn’t benefit your partner.
But that’s just my take. As you can see, I’m an avid tower fan 
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I’m definitely a fan of the color strategy, but I feel like 6 might be pushing it. I think it’s gonna come down to stacks of 8-10 with specific colors in mind vs stacks of 10-12 with a rainbow strategy. In this scenario I’d place my money on the color strategy every time.
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One of the subtle advantages of a tray+tower alliance is the first 15-25 seconds of driver control. Double tray is tearing down the stacks they made in auton to add to them and re-score them. Tray+tower early driver control sees the tray collecting new cubes and the tower moving all or some of their stack to the other goal to make a really tall stack (and they cannot be defensed, since scored cubes are in the goal.) Effectively, the tray-tower alliance has gained 15-20 seconds of play on the tray-tray, because what they did in auton is put to better use.
Presumably the tray-tower tray bot is scoring its first stack shortly after its opponents re-score their two stacks BUT they were better able to target a color (lots of purple sitting on that auton line, doncha know?).
Final phase is both alliances making their 3rd stack while one team member is on defense/tower play. Could be pretty handy to have a dedicated defense/tower bot.
[I’m calling this as the play by play during worlds round robin.]
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I feel like at low levels of competition it is tower tray, because you need to defend towers and the opposing alliance isn’t stacking as many as on world scale.
In middle levels of competition you want tray - tray. In this case you can try to gobble up enough cubes to do three stacks as an alliance and a couple towers.
At high level play, a single tray bot will put 8 or 9 cubes up in auton and they can do the other two stacks on their own. This leaves the other partner to do soly towers and defense. I think this is what we will see at worlds.
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I completely agree, this has been the strategy I’ve been talking about. Especially when autons get stronger and more consistent leaving less to score in driver, making sure you have the right colors is gonna be really important.
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My team won our pass into states very early on in the league with a 4 bar lift bot. Our alliance was the tallest tray bot and we didn’t lose a single match. The tray and lift alliance is good if you can have the tray get nearly all of one color block and the lift add multipliers.
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A good tray boy can score and descore on all towers anyway, there are a couple tricks that you have to use to manage the high tower.
You also have to account for cube scarcity, the double tray team can score 3x11 ubsurdly quickly, then have another several in the cube lock to hoard making it mathematically almost impossible to win.
This game boils down to scarcity of the cubes and with adaptive drivers the double tray has an absurd advantage on sheer intake speed, not to mention hoarding cubes with a cube lock, that amount of factors really destroys any chance of winning for the mixed team.
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cube scarcity isn’t much of an issue if you have a good auton.
a lift/tray alliance.
both make stacks of 8 in auton (talking ideal conditions here)
the tray and lift now should hoard as many cubes as possible into the protected zone. then the tray fills up on remaining cubes on the field, makes that third stack, while the lift bot can had 4-6 cubes to each of the 8 stacks from auton. you can get a bunch of really tall stacks this way.
tray/lift will also be better for auton. auton decides so many matches, so this is a real significant advantage.
1 Like