Reply To: Hello!
I’d like to describe myself as well-seasoned than wizened (you know, like a good Caesar salad) but here goes!
Something our team did was set up a GitHub repo for the group, with each person working on a different cipher type (e.g. transposition, grid, monoalphabetic). Our approach was to keep things modular, so the cipher, scoring function and solving algorithms were all separate files and you could swap any of them without rewriting the rest. We also kept a list of which cipher types to tackle first. Also, Madness’ book (which you can find in the BOSS Training Division) helped us immensely every single year!
As this is your third year, I’d suggest testing your solvers on previous years’ ciphers to see how they perform!