Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
...Teams who aren't powerhouses had to choose between hoping they get to pick a perfect alliance of specialists, ...
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I think you've hit the nail on the head here. An anecdotal bit of support for this statement - 1684 designed a robot capable of capping stacks; any size, we can get a container on them. However, at our first event, we never capped anything above two totes. Part of this problem was drivetrain/field related (deviations in field flatness and an unforgiving drivebase creating traction issues and poor handling - this also hindered our two-bin auto grab), but bigger was the issue that there were no stacks available to cap. Our QA was unfortunately low as a result, and our showing wasn't impressive.
Specialization seems not nearly as viable this year as in previous games, given the very well-matched alliance a specialist needs. The ROI on successfully doing everything is massive, and the ROI for successfully doing one thing very well is not very high. The possible exception to this is a step container grabber, which may turn out to be a viable niche position. Or maybe it won't - maybe the powerhouse teams can fill that role as well. I can envision an alliance with two high-speed step container grabbers and one high-scoring auto bot. We'll see how it pans out over the next few weeks.