Ideal Alliance Configuration

[Chris is me]

The idea that the ideal alliance is anything but 3 robots that could do absolutely everything in the game is silly - nothing would have the strategic flexibility of that. Speaking of ideals in the alliance selection metagame is uninteresting and not nearly as fun as talking about the roles alliance partners can and will take.

I think that a tube relay is going to be nearly essential to an alliance at least at the regional level. Almost every robot will be able to hold tubes, but probably only one or two robots on an alliance will be able to reliably score them. That third bot would be best served in being a "tube passer", running a relay from the feeder lane to the caution line and dropping tubes for a robot to score on the floor. They may score a few of their own, especially in the end game, but an alliance with one or two good scorers will want to keep those good scorers scoring rather than wasting their time with retrieval.

[EricH]

I'm going to say it:

There probably isn't one ideal alliance configuration.

I expect that alliances that win consistently will work together well, have good strategy, have at least good if not excellent execution of that strategy, and have the flexibility to change strategy on the fly.

And that's not just confined to this year. It's every year that doesn't have a gamebreaker, and most of those years as well.

[ThirteenOfTwo]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The idea that the ideal alliance is anything but 3 robots that could do absolutely everything in the game is silly - nothing would have the strategic flexibility of that. Speaking of ideals in the alliance selection metagame is uninteresting and not nearly as fun as talking about the roles alliance partners can and will take.

I agree. For the purposes of this discussion, we should assume that all robots can do everything in the game, because to do otherwise gives robots rather unfair advantages. Anyways, each robot doing everything in the game but excelling in/focusing on one aspect is what I bet we'll see in Einstein (and other high-level play).

[dodar]

IMO, you have 1 pure offense, 1 pure feeder, and 1 robot running free scooping up the other team's tubes and scoring them/hassling the other team for their tubes. So really, my alliance wouldnt have a true defender but a hybrid of both into 1 robot.