[MrJohnston]

I'd be nervous about entering a "boulder agreement."

If my alliance is struggling to score and the other seems to do quite well, the last thing I am going to want is to agree to start rolling boulders out immediately. Holding them is a legitimate strategy.

If you are hoping to make it easier to "capture" a castle, the solution is simple: Keep scoring the balls in play. They can only hold 6 at a time, so score another once and force them to roll it out. There are 18 balls in play, so there will always be one available somewhere unless both castles are hoarding and all six robots are refusing to shoot. I don't see this happening.

I strongly suspect that, in lower level games (think most week 1-2 district qualifying matches), we won't see more than three or four scores in either castle - much less the eight required for the capture.... In much higher level games, the scores are going to be fast a furious and nobody will have much choice as to whether or not to roll them out...