Einstein?

[Francis-134]

Originally Posted by Henry_222

Sorry for the IM posting...
For example I will use Archimedes div. from this year.
494 seeded first and picked 254. 494 then whent on to pick 997. Lets say that that alliance met the 233 alliance in the Archimedes finals and beat them. Now on Eintein the 494 254 997 alliance has the option to declare 997 as broken to opt for 233. (no offense to 997, but 233 is 233: enough said)
This new hypothetical 494 254 233 alliance by your logic would not fare as well in competition? I think not.

If this alliance manged to beat the 233/71/179 alliance, then why would they need 233? Obviously this alliance had better robots, or a better combined strategy than the opponent (still hypothetically). I mean no offense to 1124, my team's alliance was better with different robots. Was 177 a better scoring robot than 1124? Not by the numbers. However, there were very good reasons for picking team 177, reasons that eventually won us the championship. From what I've seen, no TEAM can win a championship, it must come from the alliance; from the AC, to the first pick, and probably most importantly, the second pick.

A lot of alliance captains are similar in nature; powerful scoring* robots that lead the alliance. First picks are also very similar; similarly powerful scoring robots that will either pickup the slack if the lead robot is taking some heat, or the robot that will take the heat for the AC. However, the third pick is a real wild card for most teams. Do you pick a defensive robot? What about another mid level tube scorer? Do I pick a team that may not be good on defense just so I can get their ramps for the endgame or maybe a backup ramp should my other partners get caught up? How about a robot that may not do much of anything but guarantee us 30 points in ramp bonus? All of these are viable strategies assuming that they fit your alliance.
To use my own team as an example, we went with the idea that we wanted to pick our own alliance, even as 8th seed. On our ranked list were teams that could score well either all alone or under hard defense. We then had a second list of what became known as "177 and replacements". The plan from Saturday morning was to pick a good tube scorer like 987 to help spread out the opponents defense, and team 177 or a short list of teams that would be a suitable replacement for them if they were chosen early. Either 190 and 987 would score on the rack while the other was defended, while 177 would go to the back of the playing field and either place tubes on their side, or strictly play defense. We had seen them do both of these things very well on Friday, and we knew they would be able to climb our ramps for a bonus. In the end, it turned out that our ALLIANCE won us the championships.
Think back to two weeks ago when the divisions were released. What were the odds of any of those teams winning the championship? Sure, each team was very strong and had a good chance at getting picked, or even winning the division, but even I was not expecting to be as successful as we were. My own brother said that his team (40) managed to beat 190 and 177 in prior regionals, and 190 had defeated 987 at SVR. It was only "by our powers combined" did we do so well.

*Note that for this year's game, scoring is defined as putting a lot of tubes on the rack, or lifting two robots to 12 with near perfection.