5.6.1 Four ROBOT Alliances

[Nathan Streeter]

I was very glad to see this rule change... it's a great way to improve the backup robot system and add another element of strategy at those higher levels of play!

What really bothers me about the prior backup system (which is still in place everywhere except CMP) is that the first backup robots tend NOT to be the best robots still available... The backup robots are the highest seeded, unpicked teams. Usually the alliance selection does a significantly better job of ranking robots than the qualification matches do (hence why some of the teams in the bottom quarter of the qual seeding will often getting picked)... which means that if a team "lucked out" in the schedule they will be ranked fairly high and may not be that good. This will be the backup robot.

So, I'm very glad to see this implemented at CMP... I would also like to see it implemented at DCMPs and potentially at Regionals though. At DCMPs it would be very helpful... you'd still have a good field to be drawing from, the teams picking have more experience, and the strategy would be more likely to enter in. I can't see it working as well for District events though, where you only have 40 teams and they've already played 12 matches... the backup robot pool would be fairly limited, and the quals should do a reasonable job of sorting the teams with the high match:team ratio.

As for how it'll play into strategy... I expect that to depend some on the game. In 2013, where teams generally filled specific roles because so few robots could do everything, I think you'd have seen the 4th robot being switched in for different match strategies by many alliances. I expect more robots to be effective at nearly all of the game tasks this year though... so don't expect most alliances to be swapping robots in and out. This year many alliances (especially one with 3 especially great robots) will never switch in their fourth robot. That said, there'd still be room to pick a fourth robot that would add an extra dimension to your alliance (i.e. specialized defense, good catching, etc.) that might be "too risky" to pick early on.