[alephzer0]

Hi all!
After a great (and exhausting) weekend at Mount Olive I would like to share some of my experiences from week 1 that may prove useful to advancing the metagame of Stronghold. (Possible long post/wall of text warning)
1. Speed, agility, mobility, etc. These things are HUGE. This ie especially true in playoffs. 1257 was the 7th seed alliance captain at Mt. Olive. We had a fast robot, and both of our picks were fast, and that is a good part of what won us the event. If you can have the tower close to 0 strength with a minute left in the match, you are almost guaranteed the capture. Our alliance was able to achieve this in most of our matches. In addition, it makes defense much more difficult for your opponents both to play and to play against.
2. Speaking of defense, effective defense wins playoffs. Almost always, the alliance with the better defender will have an advantage. 1676's defense was very difficult to circumvent, and the earlier they started playing defense, the less the other alliance scored , by a very large margin (our strategy was to have them damage 1 or 2 defenses and then go play defense for the rest of the match).
3. A great strategy and a good robot beats a good strategy and a great robot. All four of the top 8 alliances were eliminated in quarterfinals at Mount Olive, and this was almost certainly due to strategic differences. In addition, qualification matches could not be won if the alliance did not have a strategy and good coordination.
4. In qualifications, breaches are incredibly important for rankings; in playoffs, tower captures are very powerful. This is as predicted, but it's still worth taking note of. Every team in the top 15 got a breach in almost every match they were in.
5. If you're still reading, you have a great attention span.
6. Stronghold is a great and exciting game! I can't wait to see higher-level play of this game in week 7 and CMP.

Finally, I just want to thank teams 5624 Tiger Tech and 1676 the Pascack Pioneers for a great day on Sunday. We couldn't have done it without you guys!