Posts from Forum

The only question is the competence of this majority. I believe this is the same majority that defends the idea that "HL+U are the best templates" and loves games that last 2-3 months. I trust my own experience more than these "true pros." Among them, there are certainly some good players, but their love for HL makes their minds rigid and unable to understand the specifics of small templates. They lose a few games, get offended, and go to the forum to complain about the imbalance. But all that needs to be understood is that templates are different, and they should be played differently.

Danya, don't you consider the possibility that you might also be prone to self-deception? You lost several times on HL maps without gaining control and now you think they are garbage? And similar games on Balance have faded into the background because of this, and the template has become more favorably perceived in your memory. At the same time, I remember how much you were against restructuring; it’s a rather strange approach: "being upset about discovering twice as much as your opponent, taking a lot of mermaids, building all 5 available level 5 structures, but not getting control, while your opponent with only two mermaids got everything, but no restructuring – absolutely not."
And by the way, I don't think HL maps are perfectly balanced; there are imbalances there too. I just believe that they involve and reveal more skill elements than templates like Balance.

1. I have played significantly more games on HL than “a few.” I don’t consider them garbage and haven’t written anything like that. There is no need to attribute things to me that I didn’t say.
2. I have always been in favor of the restructuring. And I voted for it in the corresponding poll:
/topic/11348/
Enough with making false accusations against me. He remembers...
3. From my point of view, Balance also reveals quite a few skill-based elements. People who constantly play HL+U simply don't notice them. In HL, you can lose a game because you didn’t clear a path when you had the opportunity, but in Balance, you will lose because you bought an extra fairy somewhere or didn’t pass arrows to your mage heroes through a scholar at the right time. These are also skill-based elements.

1. I wasn't talking about your overall playtime on HL, but about the games that left you with a negative impression and influenced your subsequent subconscious attitude.
2. I remember at least 5 conversations on your stream where you expressed yourself as being against including the restructuring option in SoD.
3. Well, it's obvious that everyone will stick to their own opinion.

Subconscious attitude? Negative residue? Maybe you'll start analyzing my childhood and figure out that I don't like HL+U because someone bullied me at school? What kind of words are these? Why should lost games in HL+U suddenly affect my subconscious, but lost games in M, L, or Jebus shouldn't? It's you and your HL friends who have a prejudice against L templates, and at the first opportunity, you start throwing mud at them. Previously, VT players used to do the same thing towards SoD, by the way; many of them are the same people who are now criticizing HL.
Conversations on stream? Seriously? Can you provide any proof? Because personally, I only remember that Reconstruction was the second and last option from VT that I wanted to see in SoD for many years. And on stream, I also explained why I voted for it.

My opinion almost coincides with Cobra's opinion, with the difference that if we are going to include L-U in the tournament template pool, it should be Panic, not Balance. Panic is a good theme.

Terra dei Demoni is better than Balance, Panic, and even the CM map:smile04:

by the way, regarding TDD, it could actually be a playable, and perhaps even a popular, template if:
- there was no imbalance in terms of resources, where one player has 7 and the other has none. I agree that resource distribution is often uneven in other templates as well, but here it's taken to some kind of absurd extreme, probably unintentionally. However, because of this, the whole point of the template in terms of demon summoning is completely lost – why bother if you already have a bunch of angels?
- there was a normal entry point to the Treasury (in my opinion, this is the most important thing). In the version I remember, one player always or almost always had a path to the Treasury along the way (i.e., a single guard protecting the Treasury, with a value of 45,000), while the other had to go through a teleport (a guard on one side of the teleport and another on the other side = a value of 90,000).
- this teleport, in addition to the 90,000 value, very often blocked one or even two secondary paths, which wasn't a reason for restarts.
I think I wrote this before, but I don't remember if there was any feedback or not.
But overall, the idea was, in my opinion, not bad. Perhaps if it were made symmetrical, all of the above nuances would be automatically resolved.

Panic is a good thing.

You can't mirror it because the secondary skills are different.

There were restarts due to blocked secondary skills in the Heroes of Might and Magic game (with the explanation "2 or more expensive skills are blocked").

Unfortunately, the identified imbalances within the Sod's generator cannot be fixed. I plan to create a TDD (Town Development Deck) for HotA in the future, as the generator has more possibilities there.

Nevertheless, even in its current version, I think TDD is more balanced and interesting than the other L-U decks.

As I mentioned before, the main problem (considering the weak artifacts in the starting zones) was and remains the entry into the central treasure with major artifacts held by the top players – one has 45k, the other has 90k. This had the biggest impact on the balance. In this tournament, if I saw such a situation, I would take a restart, no matter what, because you never know what's on the other side of the teleport, and you could easily encounter Titans/Efreet/Fairies and other powerful creatures, and vice versa, when watching replays, I could see that my opponent was practically winning any match through the teleport.

P.S. Even with blocking one secondary Gate of the Month, I think a restart is necessary because it's possible that you were planning to build your game around that secondary Gate, and that's why you chose a particular color. However, under this condition, there would probably be 30% of such restarts in the matches, but this is more of a drawback of the template than incorrect rules.

I suggest making the central treasure forcibly underground lava, so both players will have 2 gold mines. The element of uncertainty will remain, of course, but this will clearly make the distribution more even. Making a guaranteed land passage seems unrealistic.

It is impossible to track such things at the level of the random number generator, and if you restart each secondary resource block, a lot of time will be spent on restarts. I suggest making the respawn areas slightly larger by moving the central treasure and the secondary dungeon underground, which will reduce the chance of a block.