Day 3: Every Robot should score in the speaker

We have had a lot of strategy discussions while building our field. One of the most important things about Crescendo is that it is a game where an alliance working together can dramatically change the number of points they can score vs each of them just handling their own parts of the game.

If you have a single robot running amp cycles and just using the amplification mode whenever you can, your alliance isn’t maximizing the number of possible points you can get from each note scored in the amp.

We will assume each cycle scoring in the Amp or Speaker takes 10 seconds, this is mostly to keep the number easy, if it takes 15 seconds the math still works. In each of these scenarios, all of the alliance members are perfect and they each score 12 telop cycles.

If you have an alliance of one amp, and two speaker robots. Every other cycle your speaker robots are scoring their speaker notes into unamplified high goals. This is even worse if your amp cycler is the slowest of your cyclers. If any of the amp cycles miss or are slowed down you lose a good number of points. Defense on the Amp cycler could potentially drastically lower your score.

If you have an alliance with two robots that are alternating amp/speaker and another that is just shooting into the speaker you can amplify an entire cycle for each robot every other cycle.

If you have an alliance that is very consistent and very fast, they may be able to manipulate the Amplify timing to allow them to get two full amplified cycles for every time the Amp robots need to score in the amp. One way to do this is to not use your amplify until all three robots have their notes in the air headed to the speaker, and then they have time to return to the source, come back, and score again in the same amplify cycle.