FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®)

Strategy

What is it?

It’s an overall game plan. An approach to competing in the game. It's more than the robot. It's more than planning to score faster than anyone else. It's having a plan to counter those robots that score faster than you, counter those robots that can defend effectively against you, counter that alliance that is more than the sum of it's individual robots.

• How will you play the game?
  • What can you take advantage of in the rules?
  • What are the rule gotcha's?
  • What you plan to have your robot do?
  • What are your contengency or backup plans?
  • A reliable and easily repairable robot beats a mechanism that must be finetuned to work right.
• How will you pick an Alliance?
  • What will your scouting look for and measure?
  • How will you rank the teams you might pick?
  • Identify your weaknesses and pick skills to fill your alliance out.
• Why would an Alliance pick you?
  • How do you plan to be recognized?
  • What will make you an attractive pick?
  • What makes you stand out from similar robots?
  • What is your guess about most of the robot types chosen for finals?
• How will you out strategize opposing Alliances?
  • Scouting qualifing matches
  • Scouting finals alliances
  • Breaking up superior alliances during selection
  • Reversing your standard tactics, roles,

Why?

Whatever you do have a game plan!
Developing strategy teaches critical analysis and critical thinking.
Strategy is necessary in every aspect of life. You should develop a personal strategy for choosing a college & paying for it, a career, a car, house, kids, and some nice shrubbery to go with that. It’s early, but you need a long term strategy for retirement.

A part of your strategy may include how other teams will perceive your robot. Do you have a flamboyant look or move that draws attention and will make Alliance Captains think of you when it comes time to pick partners. Does your team come across as being friendly and fun to work with, having it together, being dependable, having a robot that needs little maintenance or repair.

Good strategies are flexible and simple. They shouldn’t depend on too many things going just right to succeed. They have fallback positions, alternative, or backup strategies. What to do if what you thought would be important turns out not to be. A good strategy shouldn’t break the rules or even be perceived as skirting the rules, such as, damaging other robots if they get in your way. Even though you may well be within the rules, subjective perceptions drive Alliance picks.

Develop backups and alternatives. Strategy's should grow, mutate, and completely change to keep your opponents off balance. If it's predictable, then your opponent has all the advantage in devising a counter-strategy.

Methodology

Having a repeatable process is a crutial element in successful strategic planning. If you have a hit or miss, luck filled season, or planning that depends completely upon the talent of one person, then you don't have a methodology. Be realistic and critical in your evaluations. What do you have a reasonable chance of pulling off based on the limited time, money, skills, tools you have. For most teams it isn't reasonable to build a robot completely out of never-been-tried-before designs, just because you've seen other teams with those mechanisms.

Suppose for example you pick three mechanisms you've seen three other teams do before. Those teams may have spend their whole build period developing, trouble-shooting, and refining that one thing. They've learned the hard way what works, what the limitations of the device are, what needed to be reinforced and redesigned six times. It isn't reasonable to assume you will be able to develop your own version of three brand new mechanisms that it took three other teams to develop in the same amount of time.

• Evaluate the game rules
• Develop potential design solutions
• Evaluate your realistic design and construction capabilities
• Devise competing game strategies
• Investigate what others are planning
• Play them out on paper, walking through a match, with old robots
• Devise ways to counter every strategy you think of. Every strategy has a counter and you want to understand your weaknesses before your opponents.
• Stay firmly grounded with realistic expectations and goals, avoid the pitfall of assuming a perfect machine joined with perfect execution. Assume things will go wrong.
• Understand the capabilities and potential of your strategy
• Understand the flaws and drawbacks of your strategy
• Reevaluate, revisit, and revise when you see the game actually played

Train your Strategists

Revisit and deconstruct old games, FRC®/FTC®/Vex®/BEST® and other similar competitions work well for training. Use your methodology to devise a game strategy, then examine how they really turned out and evaluate how you would have done. The key here is realistic evaluation. People tend to be blind to their own strategy defects. Find an independent third party to validate your opinions. Alternatively, extract or reverse engineer the strategies of the championship winners, then without knowlwdge of who won and why have your trainees evaluate which strategy they think would work best, why, what can be exploited by opposing alliances, etc. Then let them see what really happened. See what the Championship Newton teams did, how they performed, how they played through mechanical breakdowns, what mattered, what didn't. Develop counter strategies to what you see on the webcast recording. How would a zone vs a one-on-one defense have worked? How could one robot slow if not stop two opponents?

Deconstruct the Game

The basis for all strategy that follows… Take into account that rules can be revised by team updates and interpretations clarified through FIRST® Q&A

• Critically evaluate the game rules
• Brainstorm the obvious main thrust of the game
• Brainstorm alternatives that aren’t obvious
• What obstacles does the playing field and game present? (lumps in the field, holes to get caught in, and bars to get hung-up on, balls to drive up on)

Game Strategy

• Foundation of your robot design
• What offense scores the most points? How can these be defeated?
• What defense is likely to be most effective? How can these be avoided?
• Hybrid/autonomous strategies that fit with tele-op strategies.
• What unique approach to the game
• What is the simplest to implement?
• What can be done and repeated quickly? Only 120 seconds to play.
• How will the view on the field hamper the drivers?
• What are you capable of designing well?
• What is the lowest risk approach? How much of your design will be completely new and unknown to you? How much will be known and free of failures?
• What will make you a desirable alliance pick?
• What will work best for qualifying rounds?
• What will work best for finals rounds?
• What is quick and uncomplicated? How much coordination and how many distinct movements will be necessary?
• How to avoid drawing penalties? What are the match killer penalties?
• Think of primary strategies, but also fall-back strategies for when your robot becomes damaged, or your Alliance needs someone to play defense.
• Basic questions:
  • How to score
  • How to keep opponents from scoring
  • How to avoid drawing penalties
  • How to cause your opponents to draw penalties
  • How to work cooperatively with your partners
  • How to disrupt your opponents game plan
  • How to look good and be noticed

Competition Strategy

Critical evaluation of what FIRST rules allow. There are always side effects of the alliance picking rule changes over the years. Beware of splitting your strategy or trying to do too many different things. Find just a few actions to concentrate on and become really good at. One of the dangers of designing a robot that can do anything and everything is that your drive team won’t get much concentrated practical experience doing any one of them.

Understand FIRST Tournaments

• Read the current rules for yearly changes
• 3 on 3 for the past several years
• Qualifying matches day and a half, every matches alliance partners randomly drawn
• Standings and QS, RS. All alliance partners receive the same scores
• Finals alliance selection made mid-day by the top 8 qualifiers, alliances built on scouting. Have your team captain there to accept if your team is chosen
• The draft:
  • The top 8 seeded teams become Alliance Captains and choose their two finals partners
  • Each Alliance Captain needs from their team scouters a list of up to 24 teams (including the top 8) teams to pick in a ranked order. Teams just outside the top 8 also need lists, because teams up to #12 or so have the potential to move up into an Alliance Captain slot. Also if you are picked your Alliance Captain may want your opinion on the third team. See scouting info. elsewhere, but preliminary lists must be drawn up after the first day of qualifiers then finalized just before alliance picking.
  • For the first pick only, top 8 Alliance Captains can choose a lower seeded Alliance Captain, but all Alliance Captains have earned the right to build their own alliance and may decline. When an Alliance Captain accepts a higher seeded teams offer, then all remaining Alliance Captains move up one Alliance slot, and the #9 seeded team (or whoever the next ranked team that hasn’t yet been chosen is) fills the lowest Alliance Captain slot.
  • No team outside of the Alliance Captains may decline being picked without bowing out of the competition altogether. Some do if their robot is irrevocably broken and cannot contribute to an alliance.
  • #1 seeded team picks one partner first, then #2 picks one, and so on.
  • A serpentine draft has been used recently where after #8 is reached and picks their one team, the pick order for the third partner is chosen first by #8, then #7 chooses, and so on.
  • Scouting becomes critically important for all to be able to find that diamond of a third pick out of a rapidly shrinking pool of remaining teams.
• Finals are best 2 out of 3 elimination, quarterfinals, semifinals, finals. #1 alliance plays #8 alliance and so on

Match Play

• Alliance teamwork –
  • Strategize with upcoming alliance partners for each match, zone defense/offense
  • Cooperate with one another, trying to do it all yourself means you aren’t a good alliance team player
  • Know your robot’s proven strength and weakness, don’t say you can do it if you’ve never done it before
  • Coaches communicate and coordinate tactics during the match. Let your partners know when you’re in trouble, so they can cover for you or help out, everyone’s there to help everyone else win the match.
  • Be consistent and dependable, accommodate and help others
  • Understand your opponents past performance and strategies. How might they counter your tactics? How will you counter theirs?
  • Carry through. If you constantly change your strategy throughout a match no strategy will have enough time to work. Your opponents will have the advantage.
  • Drivers should concentrate on individual robot tactics. The coaches communicate overall alliance team strategic goals, opponents strategy, and on-the-fly modifications.
• How can other robots and strategies be defeated?
• How can your own robot and strategy be defeated?

Alliance Picking

• Fitting into a finals Alliance
  • If you anticipate that winning Alliances will be made up of two offensive and one defensive robot You can decide to play the odds in two ways:
    • build an offensive robot to be part of the largest two thirds of Alliance makeup
    • build a defensive robot, because everyone else will be building offensive robots and you’ll stand out more in a smaller group of capable defensive robots.
  • Forming an Alliance
• Based on robots that complement yours
• Based on robot/driver skills needed to pursue a grand strategy
• Based on cooperative drive teams (do they try to wrest control from the Alliance Captain or will they willingly follow your lead

Managing the threat of other Alliance pairings

• Use your picks to disrupt other dangerous alliance pairings
• Top 8 declines & alliance captains that want to pick their own alliance rather than be picked themselves

Talk to teams you may pick to see how they feel about it

Qualifying Rounds vs. Finals Rounds

• A good qualifying robot design and strategy does not usually translate into a good finals strategy and robot. Treat them as two different games, because they will be.
  • Finals alliances are much, much better coordinated under a single Alliance Captain.
  • Scouters have made all the robots strengths and weaknesses known.
  • A robot may have dominated in Qualifiers, because few dedicated themselves to countering them
• Critically evaluate the alliances you will be up against

Tactics

Tactics are your actual actions to achieve a specific goal. They are the execution of your strategy.

• Scoring more and faster
• Cooperative alliance play
• Preventing opponent scoring by blocking opposing robots, blocking the game piece, stealing the piece away, moving the piece to where it’s more difficult to get
• Slow down their scoring by just getting in the way
• Temporary change in play due to a broken/inoperable mechanism,
• Reaction and change in play due to a partner/opponent robot falling over or otherwise becoming disabled leaving a hole in your allies or opponents defense/offense.

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