A while back, I had figured that for the meta of mix and match, scoring a beam was mandatory. It really isn’t. I have noticed that an effective design will only need to have a swift drivetrain and swift scoring of “acorns”. A consistent acorn scoring robot will likely out-perform all other designs at other competitions, in both skills and teamwork.
I find beams not as another opportunity to score points, but rather as a distraction from scoring more points. Every beam-scoring robot I have seen has used a claw. A claw is a much slower scorer than some other robots, when it comes to acorns. I feel that many teams this season will be fooled by the beam and will put all of their robot’s time into scoring beams. One large distraction comes from the “Y” shaped beam-acorn combination (shown in the game reveal video) that was worth 121 points on the stand-off goal. Compared to the max score of stacks of 3 acorns and 2 acorns, (13 stacks and 21 stacks worth 336 points) the score of 121 seems like a small, weak number.
My point is, the top performers will likely be that of a swift-scoring acorn bot that can’t score beams. (Beams = 
, Acorns = 
.)
I hope everyone understands this, and thank you for reading. Here are a couple designs that I think will perform above and beyond.
#1, PinHead: (Lipper Bot)
#2, Stack-Up:
