[Ari423]

Originally Posted by Darkseer54

As a team that focused on solely one thing this year, I can say with confidence that this is completely dependent on the game. This year was possibly the single worst year for a specialized robot (at least that I have seen). Most previous years, however, there has been a way to gain success from finding a niche and fulfilling it well.

Originally Posted by tindleroot

This year should have been great, but then every team decided to make stacks by themselves IMO the best alliance possible would have a super tote stacker with a separate can topping robot (such as 148's two robots), but there were so few opportunities for this since most teams found that they can just build the whole stack underneath the cans.

This year we realized that we would have a hard time doing both tasks (cans and totes) so we decided to only focus on totes and forget about cans. We were able to get 3 4-stacks and a 2-stack in a match (we chose 4-stacks over 5 or 6 because they were easier to cap). This meant if we had alliance partners who could not or would not cap our stacks we were not very helpful to our alliance. But when we partnered with 1089 and 365 in elims who focused on capping our stacks rather than making their own stacks we scored pretty high. This strategy got us to semifinals in 2 district competitions. We were ~10 points away from beating out the #1 alliance at MARCMP which would have advanced us to semifinals and earned us a spot in St. Louis. So although specialization did not get us into Einstein, we are proof that if done correctly (which we could have done better) it can work very well.