[Joe G.]

(Disclaimer. Due to funding, and availability of local Elevation tournament, our team will only be playing Elevation, and therefore I have thought about and looked into elevation and strategies for it a LOT more, so my post may be a little biased.)

Elevation by far.

One quality of games that I really don't like is elements of scoring, particularly those central to the game, such as the pucks and cubes in the two this year, where the obvious strategy is "if you can do it in place/method X, there is no conceivable reason to score in place/method Y." This certantly applies to the 3 "levels" of scoring in face-off. If you can score in the triangle, there is no reason to score in the circle, and if you can score in either, there is no reason to score on the square. Elevation, not so much. Owning goals will, in my opinion, make or break scores. That, along with all goals holding equal point value, makes scoring in many goals advantageous. During brainstorming, only being able to score in a high goal has been considered a big negative.

Elevation also seems to offer a greater challenge, and variety of challenges. As I said in another thread, the acquisition of the unique puck shape strikes me as kind of a non-challenge with the racks. They can be simply captured in a bin, and then just dumped out in great numbers onto the goal by flipping the bin on a simple arm or joint. Nearly all of the cubes must be picked up from the ground, or from the auto loader, which is not much easier. The bonus cube offers a similar challenge to the atlas ball of hanging-a-round, where the object is really too large to be manipulated well without a creative, well thought out design, although this time with less of a ridiculously giant bonus.

I like the platforms for face-off, but think that not enough focus will be placed by teams on making their robots immune to the rough terrain areas. I think they may serve to slow down the action of the game more than as a challenge that teams focus on creative methods to overcome.

However, only time will tell. Neither game has been played yet, so we will have to wait and see which one plays out better.