This is essentially the foundation of a lot of decisions in strategic design. Despite a lot of this being simple, these pages should not be undermined. Unless you like mining underneath the ground.

Robot units

Let’s imagine that each team has a certain amount of Robot Units. Good teams, like the Cheesy Poofs, have more robot units than less good teams, like ourselves. Robot Units represent team resources in an abstract manner, so it makes sense that the Cheesy Poofs, who have a permanently set-up full-field, in-house CNC, and bajillion sponsors, would have more robot units than someone like us who is relegated to a tiny classroom.

Basically, the idea is that it is better to put all 10 or so of your robot units towards 1 god-tier mechanism instead of spreading your robot units across multiple low-quality mechanisms. If you make 1 really good mecanism, then you become really good at doing 1 thing, which makes you able to score points. However, if you make multiple crappy mechanisms, you become unable to score points because your mechanisms are crappy.

Prior Experience

You will usually be better off building something that is similar to something you’ve built before than something completely new. For example, it is better for us to build a regular flywheel shooter than a turret because we’ve never built a turret (and we also don’t have enough robot units for one: you need a water jet cutter to build one).

However, there’s a first for everything, so it may be advantageous to build something you’ve never built before. For example, in 2018, the object of the game was to move milk crates high into the air and put them on the scoring platform. You could shoot cubes, or you could lift cubes. We had more experience with shooting mechanisms, like a catapult (2014, 2016) or flywheel (2017), but instead, we built a 2-stage elevator for the first time, and it worked beautifully, carrying us to the finals of Northern Lights, and divisional quarterfinals at worlds.

Similarities to and Elite Team

Just because your robot has a feature similar to an elite team doesn’t mean your robot is as good as theirs. Theirs is probably way higher quality compared to your crappy lowbar bot.

The Bandwagon and the Cool Factor

Essentially, this means doing really dum stuff just because everybody else does it or doing something purely becasue it’s “cool.”

Now there’s a concrete difference between the bandwagon and differentiating youself. Just because a lot of people do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are jumping on the bandwagon. For example, in 2017 everyone was able to climb… and for a good reason. If you didn’t climb, you were never going to get picked becasue due to how poor of a game it is, one missed climb completely undermines the performance of every other robot in most important matches, such as elimination finals.

Questions Questions?