(August 25th, 2021, 20:00)Anskiy Wrote: (August 25th, 2021, 14:29)massone Wrote: If you design your wizard build around taking lairs, and proceed to play a strategy that focuses on lairs, then of course it'll look like lairs are more important than anything else, for that strategy. I also haven't seen any of Sapher's recent videos, so I don't know if you're talking about the COM1 COM2 balance, because it's pretty different. The pace of AI lair and node capturing is much faster in COM2, by 2-3 years, on 13-Wizard Lunatic games.
You may want to look at his latest playthrough then. It's on CoM 2 and it clearly shows that his CoM 1 strategies still work quite well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I7lZliddSc
Furthermore, I am curious to see how your claim that city based strategies are more important than lair based strategies stacks up considering that Sapher easily wins most games by around 1506 or so, and doesn't really bother investing much into his cities, outside of a few military production centres sometimes. If you can prove that city based strategies can win that fast, I'll be convinced.
I don't have the time or patience to watch the whole playthrough, so I looked at the build, the end, and a few points in between. It is an impressive speed to victory to be sure, especially on Phantasm which I haven't tried yet.
As for your challenge, I have no reason to prove anything because:
1. I made no such claim. I said that treasure hunting is not a major part of gameplay unless you specifically focus on it. As I said, if you design a strategy around taking lairs, then it will be important, because you
made it important. I didn't say whether "city-based" or "lair-based"
strategies are
better (which is what you're arguing about). Sapher's video proves my point...he chose picks and spellbooks that have no way to compete in the late game--not even access to Very Rare spells--without getting lair rewards for more books, therefore the strategy made lair-hunting mandatory, in order to get those.
2. That interpretation of "city-based" doesn't make any sense. Sapher conquered most of Myrror pretty quick. How is that not "city-based"? My previous discussion with jhsidi was about owning cities vs. owning nodes and the resources they produce. It doesn't matter whether you conquered or built them yourself (though conquering is obviously better simply because your opponents did the building for you), either way, they're producing resources for you. A more relevant comparison would be to look at how much of Sapher's power base, gold, etc came from cities vs. node production and lair rewards over the course of the game...which I don't have the time or inclination to analyze deeply.
3. Winning fast does not equate to being a better strategy. If you're measuring based on speed, does that mean Spell of Mastery victories are bad by definition? You could measure based on speed or score if you want, but that's only one form of ranking. But one can also look at how consistently a strategy can win, and across how many different game settings and starting scenarios. For example on a map larger than Normal, if Power was not 1.5 but 0.5, on a Wet and Rich land, and if More Random Items was turned on, with no custom player-created items. The point is, there's lots of ways to play, and that's up to the player to decide what they want to do, and what kind of rules they're playing under, or what they're measuring their performance against.
Would you consider it fair if I said that we should compare strategies based on who can win if autocalc was turned on for all battles, and you literally can't use any combat tactics? It obviously isn't fair as "city-based" and economy strategies would have a huge advantage in this contest, which is why you can't choose a set of rules, game setup, and measurement that favors particular strategies, then claim those favored strategies are better.
As for myself, I would never play a strategy that extensively uses cheap combat tactics, or relies on superior combat tactics at all. The AI is forced to use autocalc on lairs and on each other, so it's an unfair advantage for the player to be able to use combat tactics to win what would be unwinnable battles for the AI. If somebody else wants to play differently, that's their own business and I have no interest in trying to prove which of our strategies is better or more legitimate until there's a multiplayer version of the game.
