Working on Battlecode was the same way for me, most intense time I've ever spent at MIT. Lots of teams were really into it which made it all the more competitive and fun.
In 2009 one of our rivals was a solo coder who was in the top 8 of the previous year (we became friends through the competition and still hang out to this day). He relayed to me a story of how one of the other teams had tried to sabotage his efforts. They sent a female member of their team over to his room to convince him to drink with her. It didn't work, although that was mostly because he already liked to drink and code.
I'll echo what skates and iba said -- battlecode was probably one of the most productive things I did in school. when everyone else is trying to teach you how to properly to document your preconditions, battlecode is purely about GSD (get s* done) - an extremely valuable lesson for an aspiring young entrepreneur.
my favorite battlecode hack: we used to assign a fixed "cost" to certain methods, namely Arrays.hashCode(). one of the more experienced players figured out that everyone was using this to checksum their radio broadcasts. he then proceeded to reverse engineer the hash code algorithm and spam teams with enormous messages that had legitimate checksums but were actually just megabytes of trash! the poor opponents would just sit there chewing cpu until the engine finally killed them for using too much heap :)
edit: actually read through cory's post - glad to see he already mentioned this one!
In 2009 one of our rivals was a solo coder who was in the top 8 of the previous year (we became friends through the competition and still hang out to this day). He relayed to me a story of how one of the other teams had tried to sabotage his efforts. They sent a female member of their team over to his room to convince him to drink with her. It didn't work, although that was mostly because he already liked to drink and code.