Quote:
Originally Posted by Pavan Dave
I agree as Captains, teams get to choose their team mates, strategy, etc., but I do not agree that they should leave someone on their alliance out of the action. I'm pretty sure a "dominating" alliance should be able to under ANY circumstance. Your 4th robot is NOT a backup bot, it is your alliance member.
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That's clearly not how 494 felt last year as the 4th team, as mentioned above. I'd be careful about making blanket statements either way.
The reason for the 4th member being there should be clearly considered and defined before a ruling on their usage is made this year. There are other ways to create a legitimate back-up pool and add more teams to the eliminations. There may or may not be other ways to add flexibility to an alliance.
As a personal side note, I enjoy the forced flexibility of only have a 3 team alliance. While you might not always have the ideal robots to fit into a counter-strategy against your opponents, the creativity forced upon you is one of the coolest parts of the eliminations, imho. Teams have to push their limits and attempt new and creative strategies to use their alliance's strengths to defeat their opponents, rather than just plugging in the members that will let them have an ideal alliance for the situation. It changes it from an the elaborate mixture of "rock, paper, scissors" to an actual match of strategy and skill. Rather than who can play game X better, it becomes who can out-think and out-perform the opposing alliance.