REWORK for the Academy. Is it needed or not?

If you rework the Town Portal, you won't have to spend the whole game defending resource locations and building chains of structures for various purposes. For me, this would diminish a part of the game, although it might be beneficial for offline tournaments with strict time limits.

You could make it twice as expensive, but I think that's too costly. And you still need to be able to build Archmages somehow.)
It's bad when, due to a lack of control, a player spends time gathering resources instead of fighting.
And the observation about offline tournaments is absolutely accurate!)