[Billfred]

A wiseguy man once told me at two in the morning in the middle of a suburban street that you've only really got to do two things to have a better chance of doing well:

1) Drive reliably.
2) Perform your main objective.

The first part is easy now; thanks to the work of Paul Copioli, JVN, and Andy Baker, you have a pretty big safety net when it comes to drive. Sure, you can still toy with a custom design, but there's always the kitbot as a safety.

The latter part can be trickier, but it's usually a bit better if you've got some fallbacks here as well. Take 1251, for example. They were waaaaaaay overweight with their shooting robot, so they lopped off their shooter, changed up some of their robot, and made their objective to be a door-dropping, human-load dumper. And really, it was pretty effective on the field. (Perhaps I shouldn't be describing one-third of the Palmetto Regional champions as "pretty effective".) Same story with 1902 this year--they had a shooter planned, but it would only be half-baked by ship day, so they opted to power balls into the corner goal. Nothing particularly fancy, but their ability to do it well sure got them a lot of work on Saturday afternoons.

(No, I'm not kidding about that first part.)