Importance of Scouting

[jodge1706]

It may only be me, but I think this year is probably one of the most important for scouting. You need to know what defenses a team can/cannot cross, so you can select the defenses that will be most beneficial for your alliance. You're also going to want to know what each team can do well when it comes to alliance selection. This year may have a bigger importance when it comes to alliances that any other year. Chances are, there are going to be a lot of teams focusing on a specific task (shooting, breaching defenses) and not trying to do everything they can. Teams on an alliance are going to have to compliment each other well so that an alliance can get every part of the game done. If scouting is not done well (or a team just picks from the highest up on the ranking list), you can be stuck with an alliance with 3 shooters and nobody to cross defenses. Thoughts?

[sagi34]

I agree about the importance of scouting this year, and that you will need your alliance to be able to cross at least 4 types of defenses and to score at least 8 balls if you want to win, but I also think that in past years it wasn't much different, every year you need a good scouting, for example in 2014 my team was ranked 3 in our regional, and we chose as 3rd robot one of the best teams this year in our regional who was ranked 40 because they had some problems in the first matches, I realy think that this robot was in the top 5 robots in our regional, but no one noticed it.
in the end we got to the final and even won 1 game, something that we couldn't do without this team.

[Boltman]

Scouting is more important this year simple due to defensive play and spy position. More variables= more scouting.

[GeeTwo]

See also this thread. Scouting is always crucial for alliance selection, but this year it is more important during seeding matches than any game I can think of. Not only is there game strategy to work out, but defense selection.