I was experimenting with different motor cartridges and gear ratios however I couldn’t choose one necessarily to use on my robot for high stakes. For both defensive and offensive play what torque should I use, what is low and what is high?
Assuming you have a 66w drivetrain, a high torque low-speed (in my opinion) is at or below 58 in/sec, while low torque high-speed drivetrains are above 62 in/sec
Xenon made a great post about this:
That entirely depends on you, your driver, and your strategy. Some more offensive people (like me) like blitzing around the field and outrunning opponents (snatching up stuff before they do), so we gear our drivetrains for speed. Other more defensive people like gearing their drivetrains for torque to bully opposing robots and (in this game) dislodge them from corner modifiers.
Try finding a good balance for your driver. If you want high torque and high speed, I recommend making a drivetrain with >66w (I’m probably doing a 77w or 88w drive this year)
As @Gigahertz.t pointed out, optimal drive speed will mostly depend on your game strategy.
Then, as you develop your subsystems over the season, you will settle on the weight of your robot, which is both limiting factor in how fast you could accelerate (lighter robot could accelerate faster without requiring a lot of torque from the motors) and with how much force you could push opponents (heavier robots, obviously, convert their weight into more pushing force through the coefficient of friction of the wheels to the ground). You cannot have a lot of pushing force with light robot as wheels will lose traction, and you cannot accelerate and drive fast with heavy robot as you will just overheat your motors.
So, the combination of robot weight and drivetrain type will determine effective range of the acceptable gearing ratio (see this topic for more details). It’s an evolution process of building prototypes and evaluating their performance.