Today is the day: the tournament begins. We start directly with the first match of the day in Division A against the now German team, Immortals.
The preparations for the game are already underway, hopefully with minimal delays.
First Half
| 05:00 | The game is likely to start with a slight delay, but that’s quite usual at RoboCups, so everything is as expected. |
| 05:00 | With a 10-minute delay, the game actually starts. Surprisingly, there is very little delay for the first game of the tournament. |
| 05:00 | Kick-off by Immortals. Immortals is playing in black, ER-Force in white. |
| 04:38 | At the beginning of the game, Immortals dominates the field, with the ball mostly in our half. So far, the game isn’t very eventful, with frequent ball placements. |
| 04:29 | There seems to be an issue with the vision (the ball disappears at the edge of the field), causing the ball placements to fail. The game is paused until the issues are resolved. |
| 04:19 | A dangerous shot on our goal. However, instead of defending, the ER-Force keeper just watches. Luckily, the ball rolls past the goal. |
| 04:13 | ER-Force shoots the ball out of the field. It’s not a stellar performance from our team so far. |
| 04:13 | ER-Force takes a 3-second timeout, the reason is unclear. At least there are enough problems to justify it. |
| 04:13 | Remarkably, not much interesting can happen in a lot of time. Not a second has passed on the clock, and ER-Force calls another timeout. |
| 03:54 | After a failed ball placement, Immortals substitutes one of their players. |
| 03:11 | Almost a goal, but the game was halted at that moment, so the goal doesn’t count. It’s a shame, as based on the gameplay and performance, Immortals deserved a goal. The most visually appealing ball placement technique from Immortals is the “Cola kisses Orange,” where they grip the ball with two robots and push it to the target point. |
| 03:03 | Another missed goal. Apparently, the corner kick was too fast. It’s probably just a matter of time until a valid goal is scored. |
| 02:29 | Meanwhile, Immortals has received 4 red cards for ball placement interferences, while ER-Force has received 1. However, it doesn’t make a difference for ER-Force as they are currently playing with only 4 robots. The allowed number is 10. |
| 01:35 | There is actually some flow in the game, even though it gets interrupted every 5 seconds when the ball goes out of bounds. |
| 01:08 | Another invalid goal. At least the ball placements are now being skipped, making the game more fluid. |
| 00:14 | The ball is actually in the opponent’s half, and there are some interesting exchanges, but then the game finally reaches halftime. The most entertaining part of this game so far is the referee’s constant “Continue” when the ball goes out of bounds. |
| 00:00 | The first half already shows that there is still a LOT of room for improvement for our robots. Often, they accidentally collide with the ball, most likely due to poor control: while our AI sends reasonable movement commands to the robot, it executes them incorrectly. As a result, the robot deviates from its intended path and crashes or collides with the ball. |
Second Half
| 05:00 | The second half begins, with ER-Force now on the other half of the field with 4 robots, just like Immortals. The few robots are due to mechanical and electronic problems: battery cages breaking, motor cables designed too short and disconnecting on their own, motor boards failing. |
| 04:46 | And there are vision problems again, causing the game to be paused once more. |
| 02:43 | Some interesting game situations near our goal and a relatively uninterrupted game. But everything has an end, and the game is stopped again, much to the referee’s irritation, who doesn’t know what’s happening anymore. |
| 02:43 | Vision problems… but that’s how it goes in the first game of the tournament. |
| 00:11 | Unfortunately, the author had to briefly attend a team leader meeting, but probably nothing exciting happened anyway. |
| 00:11 | There seems to be a penalty shot. Currently, we are also at risk of winning 10-0 because Immortals has almost no robots left. If a team is unable to have at least one robot, they must give up, and the game ends 10-0 in favor of the opposing team. |
| 00:00 | With an attempted attack on the live blog author by the remaining robot of Immortals (the ball was shot out of bounds), the game ends after a fast-paced one and a half hours with a draw. Overall, there were constant hardware and control problems, which will hopefully be fixed by the next ER-Force game at 2:00 PM. |
What can we say: new hardware. No one expected us to play like Ronaldo or Messi in our first game. Let’s hope that throughout the tournamentwe can regain our previous performance and deliver some exciting matches. Our team’s next game is ER-Force vs. KIKS at 2:00 PM.