Value & Credibility of 4th robots on an Alliance

[GKrotkov]

Originally Posted by waialua359

It worked out for you folks since you got to Einstein in 2015.
Same for us. In 2015, we got to Einstein where are 3rd alliance partner played only the 1st elimination match. The next 8 were played by our 4th alliance partner. No one was broken. We just decided to play the 3rd pick instead.

Here's the real challenge. How does an alliance politely and respectfully ask an alliance captain to sit out, when its obvious or best the other 3 robots play in a specific match? I would guess that there are many instances every season where this should happen, but alliances limit themselves because its not an option anyone would consider on the table.

I imagine this very much depends on the personalities of the alliance captain's key players, and the team's style of captaining an alliance. Seriously, this is probably pretty personal* and it'd be hard to give blanket advice for this.

For example, I distinctly remember a conversation we had with our Champs alliance partners. The subject of switchouts came up, and Sean's exact words were: "If someone's coming out, it'll probably be us." There are also alliance captains who built their alliance around a particular strategy, which may specifically involve their robot, and think that this gives the entire alliance the best chance of performing in eliminations. I've never had experience with a captain who runs an alliance like a direct democracy, but I'd be really curious to see that. Different styles of running an alliance aren't universally better or worse, just different. And probably tailored to how the captaining team works.

Given that, chances are the best way of bringing up subbing out the captain (assuming the captain didn't) involves etiquette, social situational awareness, and solid reasoning (perhaps backed up with data).

Tl;dr: How does an alliance ask their captain to sit out? Tactfully and with understanding of how their team works.

* regardless of whether it should be