HeroesWorld.ru vs GamerHome.net 2011

http://www.gamerhome.net/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=357025&extra=page%3D1

Started by numOne and winunix

I don't agree; I've looked at the map and reached my conclusions.
1. In this game I managed a 5-hero opening; the money was basically never delayed. Can the efficiency of a 3-hero opening even compare to 5 heroes — aren't those 2 extra heroes a week of any use? In one week, you could say all the money in the main and secondary areas got cleared, and that value surely covers the cost of 2 heroes? With a 3-hero opening, who knows when you'll even get the ore. If you really did lose with a 3-hero opening, it's fair to say it was because too few heroes made it inefficient.
2. The small Inferno secondary didn't help much — that's something you only saw after taking it. Are you so sure the Inferno secondary didn't have a simple route into the middle? Isn't scouting a 2-secondary map important? If you could open a path in a week but didn't. Flip the situation: if the Inferno secondary was full of money and easy to push into the middle, and losing meant you could collect, why not push into the middle from the Inferno secondary? You'd also get to see how the main route was doing.
3. As for taking the Champions' dwelling on D1, the suicide risk aside, the loss of 50+ Troglodytes aside — was it really worth it? My plan was to take 2 secondaries in week 1, then produce Champions and then clear the dwelling (on D6 or D7 — the ability to clear the dwelling is about the same for several heroes, and far fewer Troglodytes would die), but unfortunately when I produced the Champions I found the economy was no good — I couldn't even afford to clear the dwelling, and there was still the suicide risk. Suppose you opened 3 heroes and took the Champions' dwelling on D1 — let's see how many you could buy in a week. The key point of this game was that the economy couldn't keep up. Since you didn't even clear the dwelling-summon in week one, and cleared 2 secondaries but the economy still couldn't keep up (the extra money you earned exceeded the 2-hero cost), how efficient could a 3-hero week-one opening really be?
As for being unable to push into the middle — clearly the main's skills weren't good enough, the army couldn't take shape, and the economy could never keep up (at this point the number of Champions wasn't the issue — even with a lot, there's no money to buy them). In week 3 the main got Expert Earth and could enter the middle the next day — already too late.
3. The premise of not being able to see the intersection on D3 — what is it? Under your playstyle do you see the intersection on D3? Under your playstyle, even on D1 if you take 2 Champions (the upper intersection takes a few more days to open, and can you be sure you'd find the ore)?
4. As for the final guerrilla warfare, there was no choice — the two-sided central position was too brutal, there was no space, and the opponent's main kept carrying a full army.
5. As for producing magic: on W3D4 I had 0 Mercury, and with the Champions upgraded from Leap, even grabbing the Mercury near the experience stone was useless; plus with the main's tiny P/K, no magic would have worked anyway, so just don't produce. Meteor and Resurrection were both available, but unfortunately not a single Scholar.
6. The key to the final loss: the main took the full army down to the Mercury mine but passed the wrong troops, and ended up running away with one bird to kill; the secondary carrying P-Champions couldn't escape the opponent's main's attack range and got one-shot. Otherwise, after the main finished taking the Mercury, he could have retreated to his own main-town area. The opponent had to go retake his own main; the main went to the 2-secondary to grab D2 and farm resources. The P-Champions one-shot the main, and the secondary had nothing left to do.
Summary: the main's final choice was still the Savage + Haste — first, at least there was Haste, the most basic guarantee; second, since there was a Champions' dwelling, the opening didn't carry Archers, and the Demon's tiny Archery was basically useless; third, in #B the role of Tactics is much greater, no need to say more. In the end, if you really used the Demon as the main — a map with no artifacts, no stat boosts, the Demon would be just as garbage, probably not even enough mana to get past the big monsters, let alone fight the Gold Dragon of a Silver Pegasus hero.
Going by the Russian's efficiency, in a single-player run with the starting save, on D1 produce the Eyes and buy the full army, buy Champions; on D2 build the Capitol; on D3 build the Summon and buy Champions, and fight it out — see how you grab the center.
Also, the opponent's efficiency far exceeded my imagination; in this game a lot of my play was fairly conservative — in a spirit of fighting hard, I could have played even faster, like passing the full army through the same secondary, fearing blockages and guards, and so on.