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Re: Alliance Request
The hope is that the high seeding, picking teams have good scouting. They will be looking at each robot individually, regardless of whether you won or lost, and whether you were stuck with crappy partners or whether you were the crappy partner and were carried by better partners. Good scouting will see through all of that.
Our scouting this year recorded things like: what/how many defenses did you cross? How many low goals did you shoot? How many high goals? Did they go in? How long did it take to line up and shoot? Did you challenge the tower? Scale?
Note that this has nothing to do with your actual match score or win/loss, nor the performance of your alliance partners.
Then in our scouting meeting we categorized and ranked robots into several lists:
- really good offense bots (fast, consistent shooters, preferably high goal, can cycle 4-8 boulders on their own)
- really good breaching bots (fast, can get a breach RP by themselves, can go through most defenses without difficulty)
- really good defense bots (strong, fast, driver knows how to defend)
We were a pretty good breacher so when we made 5th and 6th alliance captain at our two regionals, generally we were looking for good scoring bots to complement us. We were also hoping that we might be picked as the breaching specialist by a higher seeding team, but that didn't work out - there are a lot of good breachers!
I can tell you that our drive team had things to say about which teams they really enjoyed working with, and which teams were more frustrating. This definitely influenced our pick lists. So play your hardest, but be honest, flexible, communicate with your alliance partners, and show GP at all times. A good team that's fun to work with may be more desirable than a better team that's rude and stubborn.
Here's a tip: scout your own robot. Be prepared to swallow your pride if the numbers you're seeing aren't what you hoped for. You will not win friends if you are trying to sell how great you are at shooting, but when I pull up my scouting data I see that you average 2.3 low goals per match.
Advertise only if there's something new that you think the scouts wouldn't have noted. On Saturday morning at GTRC we discovered we could open the portcullis with our mechanism. We had never touched it during quals. We told the teams that seeded higher than us, in case it was a selection factor, but kept the discovery quiet to everyone else in case opposing teams would think they could thwart us with it.
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