[MrForbes]

Interesting. We played at Alamo, and ended up being picked by the 5th alliance, we were ranked second in the quarterfinals, and third in the semis. The alliance captain's robot had a non functioning tote stacker in the first QF match, we still scored 100 pts without it, by adapting to the situation. Their robot fell over in another match, we still carried on and did ok.

If your robot dies in a match, yeah, it's difficult. It's always been difficult.

We built our robot within our means, which in our case means we mostly designed it in Inventor, but cut the plywood and 2x4s and aluminum extrusions using hand and benchtop equipment. No sponsor cut parts, no CNC, and we designed all the parts to be easy to make by hand, so that's not a limiting thing.

As usual, clever design ideas, and working within your capabilities, helps you build a capable robot, done soon enough that you can test and improve things a bit before bagging. Teams that do this usually do pretty well at the competitions. The only difference with this game is that it seems to take more cleverness to figure out how to deal with the odd game pieces, and a lot of teams are struggling.