[Xaviermw191]

My view is that your scouting data, list and rankings, has to be adaptable for the representative for alliance selections, you cannot simply hand the rep. a list of just team numbers in order of which you want to pick. If you do this, then the coach cannot properly help choose an alliance that works together and covers each others weaknesses.

I know at FLR this year (yesterday haha), my team (191) was the third alliance captain and I choose 229 with our first pick. Now 229 had been absolutely stellar at hanging tubes, easily top 5 in the qualification rounds, but were unable to successfully deploy a mini-bot during qualification rounds. We knew that with our 2nd. pick we had to pick a team with a successful mini-bot. Now if I had been up there with just a list of teams ranked, by that 14th pick, I would have been largely clueless as to which teams had had a successful mini-bot, especially because there were only around 15 teams to do a mini-bot successfully, and most of them would have been scooped up by the time we were to pick. However, my scout had given me a descriptor of each of the top teams and from that, I was able to identify 3173 as a successful mini-bot team that would compliment our alliance.

Going into alliance selections, we were unsure of what was going to happen, whether we were going to be chosen, who would be picked before us, etc. Once the scenario came about and had us picking 229, it greatly benefited us with the ability to find our next pick not only as a good robot, but additionally as a robot that complimented our alliance.

When scouting for alliance selection, it is key to be able to not just give the representative a ranking, but to also give the representative the information they need to make an alliance that fully complements each others abilities.