[DanL]

I have to disagree with you here. Controlling the other robots is a perfectly 'moral' strategy - just like controlling the goals. Going back to your sentence:

"But, Dan, to argue technical terms, controlling another alliance's robot or robots is not a strategy to have yourself achieve victory. That is a strategy to render the other alliance unable to achieve victory, which is definitely not the same thing "

What if you replaced 'robots' with 'goals'

But, Dan, to argue technical terms, controlling another alliance's goal or goals is not a strategy to have yourself achieve victory. That is a strategy to render the other alliance unable to achieve victory, which is definitely not the same thing.

What if you built a robot that is capable of completely controlling the goals. How is that different from controlling the other robots? Either way, the other alliance team doesn't accomplish what they wanted to accomplish because you are preventing them from doing that. Your post doesn't really explain why controlling robots is so 'immoral', while controlling other elements is.

Going to your soccer analogy, me being dragged around by your teammate would be against the rules - and you would recieve the appropriate consequences for that, much like if you purposely harmed another robot. What this is actually like is your team mate blocking me and not letting me reach the ball. There is nothing wrong with that. To actually achieve my goal - that is, reach the soccer ball - in training, my coach should have put us through some drills to learn how to get around this behavior - how to accomplish my mission even though you are trying to block me.