[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Of the many fundamentally broken aspects of this game's design, the one that bothered me the very most is the strong disincentive for specialization. Doing "one thing well" was all but a competitive death sentence, and I think it will take years to recover from it.

This can't be repeated often enough. As a mentor for a team with limited means, this has been the design philosophy I have stressed every single year, and it has served us very well. It simply was not possible this year, and the result was that our design process was very much stressed and our end result suffered.

This game had two game pieces, neither of which were easy to manipulate, and both of which had to be manipulated in order to score. It was simply *too hard* to build a "minimum competitive concept" bot, and I saw *lots* of teams suffering from this.