Luck of the Draw

[pauluffel]

This year there are only a few ways to score points, but the methods of scoring these points are incredibly diverse. A poll suggests 7 different types of robots people are building, and from these you can combine methods to make even more types. Now that a stack is just a bin supported by something in the scoring zone, there are even more ways of scoring points. Last year there were less than half as many ways of approaching the game, yet it was still important what type of robot you got paired up with. This year the competition will be a nightmare because the chance of you being paired up with a robot that will compliment yours will be extremely slim. It seems that there will be many matches where two very good teams will be paired up, but they will both do the same thing (say lift one box extremely high) and thus they will lose to a couple of mediocre teams that can actually move crates. The mediocre teams will move all of the boxes to their scoring zone and the good teams will be stuck trying to get some boxes in their own zone so their lifting mechanism will be able to do something. Of course there could also be a match between four robots that elevate crates and none of them would be very good at moving crates and would thus all just putter aroung attempting to move crates and more than likely a few of them would get tipped over.
This will lead to many uniquely designed robots, but it will also lead to boring matches between robots that seem really bad, even though they are very good at what they were designed to do and just got very unlucky.
Any ideas on how to make winning the game more dependent on great ideas and less dependent on lucky alliance pairing?