Alliance Captain versus last pick in Alliance Selection

[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.