Alliance Captain versus last pick in Alliance Selection

[Joe G.]

For me, 1A and 2A, without a doubt. I have had a few experiences being dragged to high placement as the last pick (and one being carried by excellent partners as an unworthy captain), with lousy, dysfunctional robots. They weren't fun, but they developed a very strong ability to gauge success through metrics other than final placement. To me, placing as a captain or early pick that doesn't make it far almost always represents a greater accomplishment for a team than a 3rd robot, even a well-done, role-player 3rd robot.

The "B" options are interesting because, while mid-range alliances that get eliminated quickly tend to be forgotten by the greater community, everyone in the community can point to several "golden examples" of picture-perfect 3rd robots, which were extremely simple to build, did their job perfectly, and had a major impact on their alliances. 1503 in 2011. 4334 in 2012. 148 in 2008 (calling this one "simple," or a good example of low resource design kinda baffles me, but a lot of people do so and it works with my point, so I'll include it). That pure ramp bot that won your local regional in 2007. And so on. And it's very easy, and in many ways completely correct, for a team to look at these success stories, decide "we should do that!", and build a robot which explicitly targets this 3rd robot position. Especially if part of what a team is after is greater recognition in the community.

The problem with this mentality is twofold. First, contrary to popular belief, it's actually really hard, and I would argue not always fully possible, to be an ideal 3rd robot through designing to be a role player, or at least to spend a season with the intent of being an ideal 3rd robot. Building a sophisticated robot capable of being a contender is hard in some very real, obvious ways. It takes a lot of engineering skill to design effectively. It takes a lot of money to put together. It takes a lot of time to assemble it, program it, and practice with it enough to get the most out of it. Building a robot like 4334, on the other hand, is hard in a very different way. It's hard to do in-depth enough game analysis to be reasonably confident in your decision to depart from the "expected" strategy. It's hard to have the guts to intentionally design a robot that will probably not win a regional, and depend on other means to get to the world championship to play the role it was meant for. It's hard to convince stubborn people to abandon the "exciting" parts of the game. It's hard to judge where to draw the line between strategic flexibility, and unneeded features which take away from the core objective. It's hard to define simplicity, to judge exactly how simple a given mechanism will be, and determine whether or not a means of adding percieved simplicity is going to make your life more difficult in the long run, or paint yourself into a corner (My team messed up bigtime on this one this year). It's hard to design a robot, even a very simple one, that radically departs from the "stock" design from the past game this year's game follows closely, from Ri3D and other prototypes emerging, especially when success at 2B essentially depends on near-flawless execution. It's hard to convince teams that your little robot is the best possible partner for them, especially if your chosen strategy really doesn't play out very much during qualifying matches.

And it's very hard to pick out the winning, genuinely useful support roles from those that just don't work out. Some examples of robots I have seen from each of the past few years, where the team behind them probably truly believed they were building "the next 4334" at the time:

• 2015: Pure canburgling robots, with well made, robust, well-engineered systems, which were too integral to the design to be upgraded enough to be competitive with elite or even semi-elite "swinging post" style canburglers. 2015 was an especially bad year for this, as at high levels of play, 3rd partners were either entirely cheesecaked creations with none of the initial design goals/intent present in the finished product, or 2nd tier human loaders with the exact same strategic goals and design elements as their slightly faster captains. Rigid specialization just didn't work out for anybody this year, and it won't necessarily work out in future years. This is another wrinkle in the difficulty of the design process for one of these robots -- teams may single-mindedly seek out a strategy that fits this mold, when an effective one really doesn't entirely exist.
• 2014: Pure goalie robots designed to man the goalie zone in teleop, with either no ball manipulation at all, or only as a total afterthought. Robots centered around catching.
• 2013: In most cases, otherwise immobile pure 30 point climbers. This one doesn't quite fit as well, since I think most of the teams who did this primarily under performed due to underestimating the difficulty of the 30 point climb, instead of strategic error. I also saw a "feeder station" robot, designed to emulate the human loader station and ferry disks down-field to their partners, which ended up just slowing things down. It didn't work out well.
• 2012: This year, most of the side/specialist objectives were actually highly worthwhile if performed with high quality execution, one of the reasons that 2012's probably my favorite game of all time. Still, I ended up seeing a lot of robots that perceived certain specialty tasks (bridge tipping and facilitating triple balances, mostly), as being much more difficult and involved than they were, and developed huge systems that encompassed their entire robot to achieve these things with authority, when in the end, almost negligible additions to otherwise fully featured robots like passive wedges or stingers ended up outperforming these dedicated designs. This is yet another area where teams going for this kind of strategy need to be extremely careful: If you zero in on a task and devote your robot to it, it's very easy to allow the design freedoms that this gives you to cause your design to spiral out of control, or skip straight past the easiest solutions because of the perceived difficulty of the task, when simple passive additions can often be the very fastest or most reliable way of accomplishing a task. Again, look at teams who centered their entire robots around canburgling, vs. those who used dead-simple auxiliary systems. Which ones were winning races?

Ultimately, while I think that it's extremely important for teams to build within their means and be realistic with their design goals, designing explicitly to be a specialty-role 3rd robot can actually be a much bigger risk with less payoff than building a mid-level robot with very conventional objectives. I admire the teams that do this and succeed greatly, but I also think that there's some of the "monkeys at typewriters" effect in play: there's an element of luck in identifying subtle, alternative strategies or nuanced specialty roles in a game that has never been played before, and with enough FIRST teams working away at the problem, there will be some bad solutions, some good solutions, and the occasional great solution. Of course, the more skilled, insightful, and dedicated you are, and the more you work at it, the greater your chance of being one of the "great solutions." But I think that it's misleading to describe this approach as safe, or low risk.

Additionally, back to the question of "which type of robot represents "success," or team growth, better?", I'd point to the history of the classic examples of B-type teams in the years after their B-type year. I can't think of any teams that consistently target, and nail, this type of strategy and role year after year. It seems like most of them either float around this approach for years, and are very hit-and-miss during this time, or move on to more conventional designs, and may ultimately reach positions as alliance captains, but not necessarily immediately. 4334 built a full court shooter which missed elims at their first regional, then a pretty conventional 2014 robot (albiet with a revolutionary stupid-simple strategic innovation which permanently altered the game dynamics). 148 built upon their 2008 season to become one of FIRST's biggest powerhouses, but nobody would call their designs these days "simple." And so on. It's clear that the teams who have walked this path see growth beyond being the 3rd robot as a valuable thing for their program, even if there's a period where they don't get quite as many blue banners.

[Monochron]

I predict if the first question didn't involve you qualifying for Champs there would be a big difference.

[pabeekm]

I would think it varies by person, team, and year based on what one’s capabilities and reasons for wanting to win are. If you want to win to prove that you can build a truly excellent machine, then that makes sense and you’d be more inclined to answer the A's. If you don’t believe you can dominate but want experience being around the teams who do, then that makes sense, too, and you’d probably rather pick the B's.

How beneficial either option can be for a given team depends on what they recognize as their biggest areas for growth. As long as a team is willing to use their end result, be it failure or success, and milk it for every opportunity it presents to improve their program, then they are clearly doing it right. Sometimes improving means testing your formula by trying to dominate, sometimes it means doing everything you can to be around the teams who have got it down; it just depends on where you feel your program is at right now.

This is coming from someone on a team who has been going for B's in order to get to champs and experience as much as possible, but may be finally ready to aim to dominate because of what being there has taught us.

[chrisfl]

Being an alliance captain and being a last pick also depends on the game. For a game like this year, it was physically impossible to beat the 1st or 2nd placed alliances(it just wasn't fun). In a game like this you would want to a last pick. However, in a game like last year where anything could happen, I wouldn't mind taking my chances as an alliance captain. For instance, our team's robot wasn't able to pick up a ball and had mecanum wheels, we got picked by the 7th placed alliance captain and due to good planning and driving skills we won the competition. Also on the case of anything can happen, that year our team managed to become 2nd place alliance captain and got out in the finals, just an example of how anything can happen. In a game like this year, I would much rather be a pick than a captain

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by chrisfl

Being an alliance captain and being a last pick also depends on the game. For a game like this year, it was physically impossible to beat the 1st or 2nd placed alliances(it just wasn't fun). In a game like this you would want to a last pick. However, in a game like last year where anything could happen, I wouldn't mind taking my chances as an alliance captain. For instance, our team's robot wasn't able to pick up a ball and had mecanum wheels, we got picked by the 7th placed alliance captain and due to good planning and driving skills we won the competition. Also on the case of anything can happen, that year our team managed to become 2nd place alliance captain and got out in the finals, just an example of how anything can happen. In a game like this year, I would much rather be a pick than a captain

I wish.....

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

On that perspective, i'd feel better to loose in division semis as an alliance captain or 1st pick rather than going on Einstein as a 3rd pick and not even playing

[Lil' Lavery]

Joe G's post is awesome, even if slightly walking away from the original question (as is to be expected). I agree with it almost 100%.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

The "B" options are interesting because, while mid-range alliances that get eliminated quickly tend to be forgotten by the greater community, everyone in the community can point to several "golden examples" of picture-perfect 3rd robots, which were extremely simple to build, did their job perfectly, and had a major impact on their alliances. 1503 in 2011. 4334 in 2012. 148 in 2008 (calling this one "simple," or a good example of low resource design kinda baffles me, but a lot of people do so and it works with my point, so I'll include it). That pure ramp bot that won your local regional in 2007. And so on. And it's very easy, and in many ways completely correct, for a team to look at these success stories, decide "we should do that!", and build a robot which explicitly targets this 3rd robot position. Especially if part of what a team is after is greater recognition in the community.

A lot of this is confirmation bias in play. For every really successful "3rd robot" the community can name, numerous others that failed to reach eliminations or were bounced early are forgotten. Many simply aren't the same quality as the "golden examples," and many more simply didn't have the good fortune of ending up on the right alliance.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

4334 built a full court shooter which missed elims at their first regional, then a pretty conventional 2014 robot (albiet with a revolutionary stupid-simple strategic innovation which permanently altered the game dynamics).

There were other teams that used the "bounceback pass" before 4334. Maybe not always a literal bounce off their catapult, but the tactic was quite popular during the qualification matches at MAR championship, and had a few incidents before that.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

148 built upon their 2008 season to become one of FIRST's biggest powerhouses, but nobody would call their designs these days "simple."

I wouldn't even call their 2008 robot "simple." The swerve drive they built is already beyond the capability of most teams, let alone packing it all into such a tiny package.

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I wouldn't even call their 2008 robot "simple." The swerve drive they built is already beyond the capability of most teams, let alone packing it all into such a tiny package.

I wouldn't remotely consider it simple either, and yet I'm constantly hearing it described as such, and lumped in with some of the more classical examples.

(I could write a whole white-paper on gross misuse of the word "simplicity," often retroactively, within the FIRST community).

[Ginger Power]

Interestingly in my two years as a student on 4607 we were the 23rd pick at a regional of 62 teams in 2013, and the number 2 alliance captain at the Minnesota State Championship in 2014. In 2013 we won the Northstar Regional as that low functioning 3rd robot, and in 2014 lost in the finals at the State Championship. So I've more or less lived the scenario and can speak to how both felt, and the impact both had on 4607.

So in terms of impact on the team and team growth following an event, there is no better thing than winning. Following our 2013 regional win, our community hopped on the bandwagon and hasn't hopped off yet. People who were rooting against us stopped. Sponsors who had already given, gave even more so we could attend the world championship. Not only did winning bolster our community support. It also gave us the ultimate oppurtunity to improve our robot at champs. We didn't really make waves at champs as a rookie team, and 3rd robot, I think we seeded 76th. However, the improvements we made there to our team and robot put us in the perfect position to win the 2013 MN State Championship (again as a 3rd robot).

On the flip side the community reaction to our losing the state championship in 2014 was more subdued. Granted getting second place at State is still going to be celebrated (I would imagine losing in the quarters of a regional would be a much harder sell). Losing the regional, even as a captain, doesn't allow for the team growth that inevitably happens at champs. As much as most of us hate the championsplit, FIRST's reasoning behind it (that Champs is a life changing experience) has validity. It is a life changing event.

With all of that being said, I'm more proud of my team's accomplishment as an alliance captain. When people ask me about my greatest accomplishments in life, the first item on the list, so far, is leading 4607 to that alliance captain role.

TL;DR in terms of team growth and community impact (making it loud), I'll choose winning everytime, regardless of our robot's contribution. In terms of personal feelings of accomplishment I'll choose captain status every time.

[Ryan Dognaux]

I chose 1A and 2B.

If we're the last pick at a regional event, I'm still happy, but I would still think we didn't do a very good job at that event. At least that's what I would think in my head.

If we're the last pick in our division at the championship event, we were picked over 40+ teams and I'd still feel great about it.

I think it comes down to the number of teams and the competitiveness of an event for me.

[JamesTerm]

Originally Posted by Karthik

it might generate some interesting discussion here.

Hi Karthik, interesting question...
I can't speak for my team, but I would like to share my own thought on this.

I'm in a different type of competition... and that is... both to adapt/learn and conquer being able to build a robot, and second to learn how to beat the 6 week clock. To me that's the win... It is like bowling... when I bowl I focus all my attention on hitting the mark... keeping my arm straight aligned to a particular board as I follow through to the release of the ball... if I hit or miss my mark... then I leave it up to chance to determine the final outcome. (That advice was passed down to me from someone who was/is pretty good at it).

Ultimately it's like we are all thrown in a deck of cards and shuffled up... it's a game of chance as well as skill... and it's really a matter of adapting to the current situation at hand... if the moment of opportunity arises can we adapt? Adapting is the real win... not only in FRC, but in life as well. Also I think it is important to build good relationships with others while we are there. So since my definition of winning is a bit different... I pick whichever gives the best positive inspiring experience for the team, and so that really is on a case-by-case basis.

[mman1506]

In 2014 with our inbounding robot we were pretty much destined to loose if we were anything but 2nd/3rd pick. If the competition was so uncompetitive that we made it to the 4 alliance captain in 2014 it would nullify any personal achievement gained from reaching that position. Last pick all the way!

[Basel A]

Interesting topic. Thanks, Karthik, for posting the thread.

When I was a student, my team had a fair amount of success. In our four wins, we captained our alliance to victory 3 times. At times, we were also relatively mediocre, low 1st round or 2nd round picks. I never really felt how it felt to be just okay, but I did find myself questioning how much I, personally, did to win those wins. And although I was a leader on my team (DL nominee, etc.), my conclusion was that I didn't do that much of the overall effort, and that didn't feel great.

Since I've joined my current team, I've been more involved in the match-by-match minutiae of competing. We're frankly not as competitive as the team I was on as a student. At our events, when we're low picks, it can feel as if we're "along for the ride." And that doesn't feel great. We've had one event when I really felt we ought to win (we didn't). We got our top choice of pick and a great second. Our strategy seemed to be effective, and altogether that felt great, even if we didn't win.

I personally am not sure I could stand winning a world championship as the 3rd or 4th team on the alliance. I wouldn't want the attention nor the praise. Rarely does an alliance have equal contributors and even more rarely do they win (they tend to be lower seeded). If I'm going to win a world championship, I don't want it to be because there were 23 better teams on my division. And I don't want it to be after my alliance knocks out a whole bunch of more deserving teams.

Don't get me wrong, I'll take the win and turn it into whatever resources I can. And in the situation of knowing roughly I'll be a low pick, I'd rather get picked by a more competitive alliance than less, even if that's a few spots later. But I'd be more proud of the captained win at a district than the dragged-along win at the championship.

[Lij2015]

Captain at the regional level and Captain at Champs(but only by a slight bit), because I like captaining and at that last slot unless you're at the most competitive regional ever you probably wouldn't get selected or have a good champs showing(not experience however because it would be good for your team).

For Champs, my (now former) team made a push this and last year to be a team that gets to champs frequently and to make elims and specifically to not be a backup bot... so I'm gonna with captaining as well. The 4th slot gives me a weird vibe though cause that means you probably didn't scout very well, you yourself might not have deserved it, or something broke.

Also, my team literally did the 1A and 2B last year and it isn't that bad other than knowing people didn't scout except your alliance captain.

However 2B gets you on Einstein and being on Einstein is an amazing experience for drive team members even if you aren't playing

[jajabinx124]

1A and 2B for me.

1A because I rather be an alliance captain and learn from what caused our alliance to get knocked out in the quarters rather than be picked last at a regional (I wouldn't complain for either scenarios, but I'd prefer 1A). I rather use it as a learning experience.

2B because being picked at champs is pretty impressive, and so is being picked last. I wouldn't mind being ranked 4th either and losing in quarter finals, that itself is an accomplishment (being ranked 4th and competing in championship elims).