What about the St Louis Winning Alliance of #171 and #650!?!
You know what. Somebody should make fantasy robotics. You get to pick your teams and then you get points on how well they did.
Anyways, IF I had a fantasy team, my all stars would be 111, 71, and 68.
I’m thinking the multipliers will probably be super important and 71 has that over the top arm slash scooper arm. Over top could KILL stacks. PLus they can take horeds of boxes and shove them to the sides quick so the other team can’t get points. How can you loose!
Plus, 68 has a lot of speed and power and it another robot manages to get all the boxes to one side, it’ll just sweep them to the end fast and other team gets 0 pts from boxes.
It all revolves around 111 though. They have a killer robot with a very unique idea. You can’t get to teh multiplier you can’t win 
If any of these robots were on my for sure list it’d have to be wildstang. I love this robot.
Thus there you have it. My fantasy robotics team.
Good luck!!
P.S. No rookies chosen 
sorry
The best alliance…
Seriously, the alliance who is the best constructed. Someone mentioned a stacker and 2 tanks. I’ve said from the begining stacking was of minimal importance. There have been few bot constructed stacks that actually scored. The vast majority of matches end in a 1 multiplier and the rest with a human player stack. My perfect alliance would be 1 amazing fast and reliable wall hitter who takes a min fo 5 stacks with him. A tank with an arm is invaluble when it comes to taking out a human stack. The 3rd bot could be a second arm equipped tank or a KoTH(45,111,179,229) bot. Stacking is utterly useless in a match with bots that are that fast and powerful.
There are 2 matches in the finals for the current dom then die strategy. One round you want to score huge and the other you want to kill the score.
For the first match play the fast wall bot and KoTH. The wall bot hits the wall first continues over then defends his human player stack. The KoTH comes up after and secures the hill. With the wall in your zone and the KoTH controlling passage over the hill the match is yours. For example when 229 worked they’re QPs were around 200 and all they did was sit on the hill for the whole match. This shows a KoTH can post big numbers. Or if you prefer use the second tank bot to try to limit the other alliances scoring, this is a little riskier though.
The second match is the kill everything round. Send the same fast to the wall bot out with the armed tank bot. The wall bot takes out the wall and then continues to his side and pushes boxes into the dead zone. The tank bot stays on the starting side and kills the stacks. Then shoves them into the dead zone. The tank then moves to the lower left of the ramp. The fast wall moves to the upper right. Near the end when the opposing alliance moves to the ramp they’ll have to come up the center. Being near each other increase the chance they’ll end up touching and if 1 is off both are off. Also being close increases the chance they knock each other off as the first alliance is shoving them.
The draft at nationals will determine the champion. Selecting the wrong bots IE all tank or no bots that are fast to the wall will end the alliance before it even began.
hmm… I hope we win.
Best of luck to all teams competing at nationals. CYA there
Texas is going to be exciting to say the least! If it anything like the Buckeye or Great Lakes, we will all be in for a heck of a ride! As far as competitive alliances-27 with 541 and 1126 was formidable in Ohio and all 3 teams will be in Texas, hopefully all in the same division. 322,27 and 217 put up a real fight to the end against a real tough alliance in 302,67, and 226. The final matches were a ton of fun to watch. Or 27, 302 and 217. 3 'bots with fast auton modes and excellant defenders. Baxter looks pretty fierce this year, 2.5 seconds to the bins is awesome! Guess we’ll have to step up our program!! Can’t wait to see the Technocats at the top of their game. Also looking forward to seeing Swap thing in action. #308 always has some pretty cool designs. 25 will undoubtedly put up a tough fight too. Would be nice if my cable company had the NASA channel. I would have liked to watch the competition in action. I guess Soap will have to do. The list of competitive and awesomely engineered bots is too long to go through. We are looking forward to seeing everyone down in Texas and can’t wait to start playing!! Good luck to all the teams who are going. Have a safe and quiet journey. 
Texas is going to be exciting to say the least!
Very True… Can’t WAIT!
*Originally posted by sevisehda *
**The draft at nationals will determine the champion. Selecting the wrong bots IE all tank or no bots that are fast to the wall will end the alliance before it even began. **
Definitely.
Picking is going to be the most important part of the compeition this year. Everyone better be scouting!
PS.
my alternates are 45 and 79 krunch. 79 has an insane drive system. They’re pretty wicked.
But wait and see. they’ll win if they’re in the same DIV.
Everyone better be scouting!
I’ve received several e-mails already. It seems that many teams have decided to start scouting already, and creating a list or database of possible allies or opponents.
HINT HINT: Seems pretty smart
i never thought a stacker would do well in the playoffs, but 115 (Monta Vista Robotics Team) proved me wrong. We were allied with them at SVR. They successfully stole the oposing alliance’s human player stacks twice, gaining our alliance a 3x multiplier and a 2x. Without there stacking, we probably would have lost.
Well the nature of the game this year is quite different from the past. Someone mentioned before that this game favors rookies but I’m not too sure on that. Some of the most impressive bots I have seen this year, are from teams that no one expected anyone spectacular out of this year (basing their judgements off of previous years) but they pulled through this year with some amazing bots.
This is my forth year of doing this program, and I will admit I was horrible when it came to judging other teams/knowing what other teams were REALLY capable of. Someone mentioned the ‘big boys’ of FIRST, and those bots are going to go very far. I have no doubts that those teams will do very well in their divisions.
However, scouting will also be a very integral part of this year’s game. Those who do not do scouting well, will suffer if the time for them to pick an alliance comes. In fact, I think that scouting this year will play an even bigger role than in previous years, but thats my own 2 cents.
However, following the ideal of FIRST and gracious professionalism, everyone will win at this competition. As a personal note, this is by far the most fun I’ve had working with this program. It made me feel like a rookie again and I can honestly say I haven’t enjoyed a FIRST competition this much since my rookie year on 250 in 2000.
I merely hope that everyone will enjoy nationals and that the winners will put on an exciting show in the finals.
P.S. I may know who the ‘big boys’ are, but I’m still not placing any bets yet 
Im willing to bet that at least one of the winners of the championship event this year participated last weekend at the Midwest Regional.
I’m predicting a rookie, cause some of them have been extremely impressive, even besting teams who helped create the team.
I know we’ve all said stacking isn’t important; but no one has done it as well as we thought possible yet. If there is an excellent stacker (i.e. consistently 6+ in a minute or less) then that will be part of the winning alliance, this could also possibly be or include a stack stealer.
And one of the winners will be a massively powerful KOH bot, that cannot be pushed around anywhere on the field and can block the whole ramp or let a partner/opponents on.
I have to agree with Gope and several other posters of this thread. It will be won by two strong veteran teams and a good rookie/second year team. I consider 111 very strong contenders.
THE DEVIL BUG WILL WIN!!!
Did anyone see the Devil Bug? We were pushing it around the Midwest pits on our cart (it’s only about a foot cubed in size)
*Originally posted by Wayne C. *
**I predict the Nats winner will come out of the Rutgers Regional in NJ. Nuff said… **
From the Rutgers Regional?—YES
From NJ? ----I DON’T THINK SO…
Whomever shows up…
*Originally posted by shawny963 *
**i guarantee it will be an alliance similar to ours, 930, 65, and 16 at midwest. Two blazingly fast and strong veterans, with a very robust 2nd year or rookie. Our alliance took the bins everytime with our auto modes. Baxter hit the bins in under 3 seconds, 65 in 4 seconds, and we followed up with 5 seconds. I think the midwest outcome would have been different if 16 wouldnt have lost radio connection in the first finals match. Oh, by the way, we flipped beatty two matches in a row. Now what do you all think about that alliance. **
Personally, I wouldnt brag about flipping over another robot, that is very unfair to do it intentionally. Plus, garunteed that Beatty is 3 time nationals winners, DOESNT MEANT THAT THEY HAVE A HUGE BULLSEYE PAINTED ON THEIR ROBOT!!! I have a friend on 71 and she was telling me how irritated they were that 1 team whenever they were against them all the other team did was to bash them. if that was so, then i would qualify that as being ungracious and not being professioal.
Bad
Well, I say this thread is really for nothing. FIRST is mostly about the spirit. NO WAY ONE PERSON CAN SEE 100% OF THE TEAMS! I just say we all enjoy what we can. Sure, winning is a nice bonus, but comon, too many people are saying who is going to win…
posted by badjokeguy:
“Personally, I wouldnt brag about flipping over another robot, that is very unfair to do it intentionally. Plus, garunteed that Beatty is 3 time nationals winners, DOESNT MEANT THAT THEY HAVE A HUGE BULLSEYE PAINTED ON THEIR ROBOT!!! I have a friend on 71 and she was telling me how irritated they were that 1 team whenever they were against them all the other team did was to bash them. if that was so, then i would qualify that as being ungracious and not being professioal.”
Did you see the matches for yourself?
I think you should inform yourself before suggesting that 71 was intentionally knocked over. If you go to SOAP and watch the QF4 matches you’ll see that when 71 got knocked over the first time it was during autonomous mode (impossible for that to be intentional) and when they got knocked over the second time they were pointed downhill with their heavy side down and got bumped – not very hard – by another robot (imho not intentional).
If you watch Match 20 where we did a fair amount of “bashing” their robot – which was intentionally blocking the ramp using their immobilizer pad, thus making themselves a target – we were only trying to score ourselves to win the match. We stopped bashing once they were out of the way, and we didn’t fight them after we got on top. We were playing offense the whole time, and the score reflects it.
I would be surprised if there are any hard feelings about any of these matches from the Beatty coaches & drivers.
Ken