[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

It saddens me that the dominant form of play was so segregated. I still feel, even after Einstein should have shown me better, that there was room in Recycle Rush for collaborative alliances that build stacks in an interesting way: like 1986/233/4575 in Queen City, 1089/365/423 @ MAR Champs, or 1325/3683 here: https://youtu.be/Dd-SQmZg8tQ?t=71

Looking back at the game (heck, even looking at the game in January), I see potential for all these collaborative roles; bin managers, cappers, stack movers, immobile stackers - but none of it was competitive enough.

It seems like a real shame. However, I can't find a strong relation to the lack of defense. Was it that teams, when they don't have to think about making a machine quite so robust, try to do more?

Agreed. There were exceptions to this at the highest levels, but very few. I think a big part of this was more that there weren't a lot of extremely competitive role-players. 27 being the obvious exception, I can't think of many robots that were exceptional cappers or stackers. Most stackers could make almost as many capped stacks as uncapped stacks.