FIRST Stronghold™

Game Overview

FIRST Stronghold™ is based loosely on a Castle Raid. Each alliance much launch 10 in. foam “Boulders” into the opponent alliance’s “Tower” as well as traversing the alliance’s “Defenses”

Field

FIRST Stronghold™ is played on a standard FRC field, featuring “Scotch Pine” colored carpet. It features two main sections of the field, which is duplicated on each side of the field. The central area between the two Outer Works is the “neutral zone”, in which 6 of the boulders start at the beginning of the match.

Outer Works

The outer works consists of 5 slots for various defenses on each side of the field. Each game round, the defenses will be switched out for various defenses chosen by that side of the field’s alliance for the other alliance to traverse. The defense slots are numbered 1 through 5, with the secret passage bordering the 5th defense slot. Defense position 1 always had the “low bar”, while defense position 3 was decided on by the audience.

Out of the 9 defenses, they were split up into five groups, lettered A-D and then the low bar. The following image shows the various groups:

Driver Station / Tower / Secret Passage

The driver station was similar to previous years (see 2014), except on the top of each driver station there were plexiglass merlons that served no game play device. In the center of the field end was the “castle”, a three sided (think hexagon cut in half) tower with five goals: two on the bottom right above the “batter”, and then three goals above, slightly raised outward from the lower goals. Directly below the three high goals, three handing bars that the alliance could scale at the end of the match. All five goals were the same dimensions; about 24 in. by 16 in. with a curved top. It featured retroreflective tape on the bottom sides of the goal for vision tracking.

The driver station featured a human player station on one side of the field (the left facing the field from the driver station) and had three holes to insert boulders into the field. There were two square holes on the bottom for human players to “bowl” the boulders into the field, and one embrasure for human players to insert boulders directly into and have them drop directly down in front of the human player station. Directly in front of the human player station is the “secret passage”, a area protected somewhat from the opposing alliance. It was surrounded by a 1” tall berm around the area of it that connected up to the outer works. The secret passage extends past the outer works partly into the neutral zone in the center of the field.

Game Play

Like most standard FRC games, FIRST Stronghold™ starts with a 15 second autonomous period. Robots can score points by crossing defenses and scoring boulders in any of the goals, just like teleop, but can also “reach” a defense by just being partly on the outerworks to score some points at the end of autonomous. After autonomous is finished, a two minute fifteen second teleop period beings, in which teams can cross defenses, score boulders and play defense. During the last 20 seconds, robots may extend past the height limit of 4’ 6” and try and scale the tower for extra points. If they cannot scale, they can simply drive onto the batter surrounding the tower and get some points there.

Scoring

FIRST Stronghold™ reintroduced the concept of “ranking points” after their absence in 2015. A team could score up to four ranking points per match:

• Two for winning the match
• One for having a tie in the match
• One for “Breaching the Defenses”
• One for “Capturing the Tower”

Breaching meant that at least four of the five defenses your alliance were attacking were entirely damaged (two crossings). A capture meant that the tower had gotten it’s full amount of boulders into it (eight during regular season, ten during FIRST Championship), and all three robots were either scaled or parked on the batter of the tower. During eliminations, ranking points were not used and instead match points were given to a alliance who breached or captured the tower - 20 points for a breach, 25 points for a capture.

The points assigned during matches are as shown:

Season Schedule

The game was released on January 9th on the official FIRST kickoff. The kickoff not only included the release video, but several skits to inform on the kit of parts, FIRST scholarships and interviews with several FIRST celebrities, including Woodie Flowers and Dean Kamen.

Trailer

Prior to the official kickoff, the medieval theme was announced in October with a official live stream from GameSense (now the RoboSports Network).

Robots