The 2026 FRC robotics game released yesterday. I was busy doing USACO so I haven’t had time to think about it until today.
First, some preliminaries:
We still don’t have a technical captain. AP is in a position to assert de facto captain… If this doesn’t change in a week that would be rather tragic.
Day before kickoff (or two days?) we had a captains only meeting. Our mentor brought up punch tube, and I ask them, “why haven’t we purchased punch tube yet?” Well they decide to buy punch tube at some egregious price (wow we can’t buy stuff day before kickoff and expect good things to happen!?!?!?). I’ve been telling them to buy punch tube for the past… month? month and a half? (well, i hope they bought enough, otherwise….. whatever)
We meet every day except thursday. They don’t think its enough. Teams that meet for like half of the time beat us, so idk what they’re talking about. Our mentor agrees. Well, this is probably a good thing, so I have thursdays free.
They arrived at kickoff at 10:30 for some reason. Perhaps it’s a good thing I had to do USACO, why would you ever arrive at kickoff 2 hours before the actual reveal???
The game is a shooter. 5-in hard-ish balls. unlimited storage. enforced no-score periods where you have to play defense. Traversal hang.
Kitbot is very strong. It’s pretty hard to do better than it.
Most teams already have their strategy set. The meta will be very simple, basically kitbot. Ground intake, storage, flywheel.
So… where can we do better? can we do better? I don’t think we have much to gain from making another kitbot-esque robot (although, at least, it would work).
Execution is rather important in this game. More important than in most games.
Our team already wants to go for the meta. Plus fancy stuff like adjustable-hood shooter, vertical extensions, hang.
right now my view is that if we make a flywheel-bot, we make something very similar to kitbot. Nothing complicated, maybe horizontal extension, maybe hang. In general I’m not even sure if hang is worth it, you can probably compensate for it pretty easily with shooting anyway.
for less meta strategies, I’ve thought about trying to catapulting a large amount of balls at once. But that’s probably not profitable because of high ball loss and you can’t store that much either.
or maybe hoarding balls, but there are too many balls for this to be useful in any way.
or specializing defense, since it’s forced to be important. actually defense can affect this game in many unexpected ways……
perhaps like a blower blowing the balls on defense would be useful. But that depends on a lot of technical specs.
It seems pretty hard for our team to get any sort of advantage here. Maybe the best thing to do is to stick to the meta, and to execute well? But I don’t trust that to happen, at all. But the alternatives aren’t much better…
We’ll see what happens into the season, I guess…
