Value & Credibility of 4th robots on an Alliance

[Cothron Theiss]

Originally Posted by pandamonium

What if an alliance at championships gets a small bonus for using a 4th robot.
...snip...
Thoughts?

Originally Posted by EricH

You'd have to phrase it such that both the third and the fourth robot played in the set of matches, which I rather suspect would end up very similar to the "every team plays at least once per round" setup. Possibly, use that as the first tiebreaker in eliminations (he who uses the most robots in the round wins)--see also "another can of worms".


I think the requirement that every team play in every round would be quite sufficient. Sets up some interesting strategy decisions and I'd be willing to bet that third matches have a matchup that didn't happen in either first or second matches.

As EricH mentioned, I would word it as the alliance that plays all 4 teams would get the bonus, not just the team that plays the 4th team. Otherwise, you might see the second and third rounds of Alliance Selections turn into an absolute mess.
Either way, I'm not a huge fan of just an objective point bonus for playing all 4 robots, but depending on the game, it might work. I think an ideal solution would be for games to be strategically diverse enough and all teams capable enough that it becomes strategically worthwhile to play different teams. Or (I'm scaring myself as I type this) even a scoring system that changes from match to match. For example, there could be two *equally* difficult end games for teams to choose between at the end of the match. One end game would be worth, say, 5 points and the other worth 10. These point values would swap from match to match somehow, making it more advantageous for alliances to select 3rd and 4th robots that can perform different functions and swap between them.

But then again, this comes with the drawbacks of being hard to implement, hard to design for the GDC, lots of rules, lots of work. But hey, maybe things will move in that direction.