[Alpha Beta]

It looks very similar to IRI:

Bottom row increased in value to equal the middle row.
- For teams capable of filling the rack there is some advantage here. At the KC regional I rarely saw an alliance go over 4 logos. May not make much of a difference at this event. Especially since the top 8 cannot pick amongst themselves. (However KC was a week 2 regional. Some teams have gotten a lot better since then, and Bombsquad is coming to town. Maybe it will play a role.)

Uber tubes allowed to be hung during teleop to act as doublers.
- I like it. Missed Uber tubes clog the scoring lane for us, and become an extra obsticle. Now we can do something productive with them. Advantage still goes to those that can hang them in auto though, which is as it should be.

Minibot scoring adjusted to 20, 20, 15, 15
- While this rule change does diminish the advantage of the fastest minibot, it still makes it imperative that an alliance get two minibots up. Consistancy over speed. We may have to build a back-up that can still climb with partially smoked motors in the event of a catastrophy.

Alliance selection maintains the serpentine, disallows picking amongst the top 8, and allows teams to select a 4th alliance member to rotate in as needed instead of the traditional back-up system.
- Very happy to see the serpentine preserved. I believe this is a departure from the IRI set-up this year. There is some concern that teams will be fighting to be #9 instead of alliance captain #8 in hopes of making themselves available to the top alliance captains. Inspite of that concern I do applaud the effort to make this the most competative set of elimination rounds the CowTown has ever seen.

Lots of other subtle changes to look over as well.

I'm hoping we get 32 operational robots to make the new alliance selection system work. We nearly ran out of functional robots last year and eneded up parking a dead one in front of a goal at one point instead of playing active defense for the CTTD version of Breakaway.