[MrJohnston]

I agree with most of the assessments above... However, I do see being short enough to go under the low bar as being a very important aspect of this game.

* A robot hoping to advance out of District/Regionals has to be able to score points, even when allied with inept partners. There are two primary ways to do this: damaging defenses and scoring boulders.

* If a bot is designed to primarily damage defenses, being low is almost mandatory - Being short allows to you easily damage one of the defenses with no manipulators required (or even a fancy drive train).

* If a bot is designed primarily to score boulders, its design must consider from where it will acquire the boulders to score. The most reliable source will be its own secret passage - to which the most efficient path is under the low bar.

Though, being low isn't "mandatory" - its not like all three robots on an alliance will likely be able to share the path under the low bar to the secret passage particularly well, being low doesn't prevent other options (such as going through a different defense to attain boulders in the neutral zone; picking up missed shots in one of the courtyards or sneaking into the opponents secret passage to swipe a loose boulder)....

Yes, we have s short robot.