[pfreivald]

If I were in charge of making Stronghold a top-tier-robot-only game, I would:

Keep the tower strength at 10, as at Championship.

Keep all the defenses. (Heck, if we can design for the drawbridge, anyone can--and if they didn't, that's really their problem, isn't it?)

Get rid of crowd selection and choose the random defense with a coin flip. (I might just be grumpy that they institutionalized a built-in penalty for having a small team.)

Change it so that any boulder that has contacted the carpet of a secret passage must be carried over the outer works to be scored (as if it had come from the neutral zone--so no more scarfing up boulders from your opponent's secret passage and immediately scoring them, though loose boulders in the courtyard are still fair game).

Change a breach to all five defenses.

I would be adamantly against changing the breach/capture QPs--robots were designed with those parameters in mind, and it would be too significant of a change at this point. As others have said, it adds both tactical decision-making and end-game excitement.