REWORK for the Academy. Is it needed or not?

I don't particularly care about the *purity* of SOD, but I just don't understand how rebuilding will affect balance. Say the 1st player got lucky with control, and the 2nd with army. With rebuilding, that's a 100% win for the 2nd — where's the balance in that?

Rebuilding means losing a ton of days and valuable resources; there simply might not be enough time for it. You still need to take Dragon Fly Hives, Griffin Conservatories, and Dragon Utopias on time.

Yes, there are games where you can't find a certain spell, but I don't remember a single drawn-out game where you don't find at least 1 out of 3, and that's usually enough to cover the opponent.

Just believe me, Dima, either you're extremely lucky, or you have very little experience in ХЛ drawn-out games.))) Mizrael, Maretti, Redwight, Dirty, Dark — games that come to mind right away. Try to win without Town Portal at least against an opponent with full control. And here either there was no control at all, or when it's finally brought in at the very bottom corner of the treasury on the 6th week, it's already just a formality, because a skilled opponent will have eaten the entire map by then!

If there is any benefit, it's only in speeding up the game, and not in balance at all, imho.

Suggest a reasonable alternative for finding control in ХЛ.

Why is no one talking about one-way directions, insane dispersion in layouts, impenetrable blocks? All of these affect the game result far more, or rather simply reduce the chances of winning to 0, and these are more generation bugs, since often the surrender is simply impossible to play.

Because it's useless to try to influence all these things in SOD.
I remember all the talks about morale and the gr. stack... there's simply a considerable number of old believers, and to push through even the slightest useful change, you have to run a massive election campaign(

P.S. Maybe it's worth making rebuilding cost the total amount of a GM, say for rebuilding up to the 4th level inclusive, you need 18 of each resource and 5k gold, or something close to that. For those rare cases when all the secondary Citadels fail. :)

Well, you need to calculate how justified it would be; I would suggest a 1.5x multiplier per magic tier as a reasonable compromise.