2013 Game?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by KevinGoneNuts

Does anyone know if in 2003, anyone actually built a stacking bot? I'm looking at video from stack attack and they're all pretty much small bots designed to just knock the wall to their side which would inevitably win the game.

YES! There were a number of stacking robots--217 being a notable member of that group for their ability to protect the stack they were building. However, the way the game ended up being played was, quite simply, knock the wall to your scoring area in automode, take out the stacks the humans left in your area during the human player mode, and park on the top of the ramp. See 60, 68, 234, 980.

330 built a stacking robot that could theoretically handle an infinitely high stack (though it would be rather precarious--in practice, our method could get about 8 before a collapse; in competition, we never got more than about 2 before someone knocked the stack over). However, due to the way the game actually played, the stacking arms became used primarily for causing about half the wall to come down.

There were no prohibited zones; the first zone prohibition of any form came in 2006 (no more than 2 on defense during part of the game); the first all-match prohibition came in 2011 with the lanes. (Protected zones, where if you were in them you couldn't be hit, came a year earlier; see 2005's loading zone Kiss of Death 30-point penalty.)

In retrospect, the reason for the stack attack in Stack Attack was that 1) it was a whole lot easier to knock down a stack than to build it up, 2) the top of the ramp was worth a lot of points in comparison to a stack, 3) the stack height ruling just kept on changing, so nobody really knew how tall a stack actually was until some time into build, and 4) the bins broke so often that keeping enough around to build a stack in practice was pretty hard .