REWORK for the Academy. Is it needed or not?

I did write it. And in the same way, you can write a tactic for playing on a dead keyboard. Or a tactic for playing when the opponent is sitting across from you and the audience is prompting them (there are many subtleties there). Or a tactic for playing against an opponent who is late for a train.

Nevertheless, all of this is not part of the gameplay. More precisely, it is not part of the "physics of Heroes", I think this term fits better in meaning. It is precisely the "physics of Heroes" that it is undesirable to change. But the organizational component (including the template, difficulty level, timer, rules for choosing towns, etc.) — change as much as you want.

I somehow missed it, or rather, I didn't watch the end of this thread about how not to give another chance to noobs or crabs to pin down the daddy, and that particular motive is the only one. And the vote distribution just shows who is for the game and who is for medals. And the balance in heroes — with the current generator — can be evened out only by adding the same extreme "deus ex machina" rather than supplying them from the start (and that's exactly what the restructuring looks like — like guaranteed sawmill, ore mine, etc.). And the point of the game is to guess the mechanism for greater vulnerability of the opponent. By the way, on quick-play maps, even the presence of an Arrow, a Ciele, and some kind of Greaves for one player against their absence for another is the same imbalance.
And there was a lot of debate about the timer. And the current one, supposedly a chess timer, is pure gameplay, including at the level of physics. It seems that there's a memory gap (and this is without irony) that in SoD the timer doesn't tick during battles. The effectiveness of a player's actions is measured by the number of useful actions per unit of time (like in chess — 40 moves in 2 hours), and the current timer in battles doesn't account for this at all, and therefore works, for example, for Troglodytes, Skeletons, and against the same Master Gremlins, Harpy Hags, Ballistas, Mages with singles, etc. — regardless of the stage of the game, since only absolute time is counted, not how skillfully the player actually maneuvered. And how is that not gameplay? You said yourself that it's a gameplay shift. But that was a long time ago, no need to bring it up. But adjusting the timer in battles — that would be valuable.