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We had 2 MechEs, so they wanted to do most of the work and take some of the load off the programmer. Thus came the idea of the stationary bot with extension arms. We wanted to control the vote, so we had to block the losing vote at the beginning of the round so that any vote thereafter would not change the value of the balls. The second arm was used to score negative points in the other team's scoring area. Now why wouldn't we block both sides, thus preventing any voting and blocking the opponent from advancing toward our half of the board? Well, we'd lose if the opponent had an offensive scheme completely on their half of the board.
Thus the Halfback was born. Our 2nd bot, affectionately called the Little Guy or the Halfback, was going to be our offensive weapon. So while our arms would block the losing vote and score negative points, our Halfback would pop off the back and collect positive points for our scoring area. The question is, which scoring area would we go to?
We figured the simplest strategy for most people would be what we called the Hail Mary: collecting the positive balls and going for the far scoring area on the other half of the board.
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Hail Mary
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If we didn't have the Halfback and the opponent ran the Hail Mary, we'd be screwed. If we ran the Hail Mary ourselves, we'd collide with their bot. Traveling to the other side was too much uncertainty, so we decided to run what we called the Option. The Option called for collecting all the positive balls on our half of the board and returning to our scoring area directly behind the starting blocks.
The benefits of the Option were:
- we stayed on our side
- avoid collisions
- avoid uncertainty on opponents territory
- we could steal positive points from the opponent if they ran the Hail Mary
Thus our final strategy was to deploy our arms on the side of the losing vote, blocking the voting area and pushing negative balls into the opponent's scoring area. Then pop the Halfback off the back and run the Option. We could score a maximum of 22 points in our favor.
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Final Strategy with The Option (red winning the vote)
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