My feedback is not that useful...when I saw the field of players I was quite intimidated and I'm sure it effected the amount of time I put into it. If I were to play the map with a less intimidating field I'd probably have more to say.

On a side note I do not really understand why people could call it non strategic. Maybe my definition of strategy is wrong but using given settings to your advantage is pure strategy. Knowing the luck factor and using it wisely is strategy.

OK, I saw You made an effort of a deep analysis of the template, arranged a tournament, played some (hopefully) good strategic games, finally started this conversation (I find interesting what motivated you to do all of that by the way :p) so I feel I owe You a few words of my own observations (probably most, if not all of them were already expressed by someone but why not to strenghten their voice).

Let me just list the most important of them (I put [+/-] next to each observation to show if I find it makes the template better or worse)

Picking stage:
1. The picking methods are nearly the same to thouse used in the curent 1v1 ladder. [+]
2. I think that good coverage is not that important here as in some other strategic templates. (See my game with fireice, though I admit I didn't play it brilliantly. [-]
Later game:
3. There is a really little chance of taking a (+3) bonus already the first turn. I will calculate it later, or maybe You can do that :) [-]
4. The game requires very good armies distribution due to luck, like the old strat 1v1. [+]
5.(suspended due to luck of proving calculations) While in other templates it is better not to atack once by once a single neutral territory, here it is often reducing negative luck influence. [-]
6. The big amount of cards and delays makes it less fun to play for me. [-]
7. The luck makes a better chanceof a comeback when slightly losing. [+]

The template is surely unique, though I think the settings complicate the game a bit too much. Thank You for Your work on developing WL. I am looking forward to see some more of Your ideas.


Let me also not comment my performance in the tournament :p

Thanks so much, Sultan. You make some good critiques that IMO only someone who had actually played the template could have made. For example, I find your #3 very interesting. I will try to calculate that and include it in my analysis thread.

6. The big amount of cards and delays makes it less fun to play for me. [-]

So indeed we finally have some direct evidence that delays might actually be a problem. I maintain that this is the first report of it I've encountered. I wonder how common the problem actually would be; that's perhaps the biggest thing I hope to analyze, namely How many turns/games were actually significantly influenced by small delay moves.

I'll concede that playing with more cards would be less fun for some people (comparing to "Strategic 1 v 1"), but I imagine it's better than the alternative which would be to *always* have delay moves being relevant (comparing to "Pure Luck" without multi-delay).

This is about as large as the Lancer paper, looks sound though, good luck presenting it to CL8/9 / Wgl / Seasonal Ladder

This is about as large as the Lancer paper, looks sound though, good luck presenting it to CL8/9 / Wgl / Seasonal Ladder

Hehe. Funny enough, someone, DanWL, already proposed it to WGL, but I don't know if he was joking or not. :-)

I guess I need to be very very clear again: I don't consider this template particularly 'good', as in 'probably it's not even as good as "Strategic 1 v 1", seeing as it's a near-clone of that one, and not nearly as tried-tested-and-tweaked as it'. I never intended it to be competitive in that sense. From the very beginning it's just been a proof of concept intended to be similar to "Strategic 1 v 1", except with as few changes as possible to make the 100% luck setting work in a strategic way.

All of my arguing over it from the very beginning has been *in response* to what I considered to be 'bad arguments' against it being a) strategic, b) practical/playable, or c) fun. (Fun does not equate to strategically 'good', IMO, it's an independent variable.)

I think the template -- despite the stress I experienced during the tournament -- is decently fun, similar to "Strategic 1 v 1". I think it gets bonus fun points because it's kinda refreshing to play with big luck % again for a change, while not getting too many 'unlucky' exchanges. On the other hand IMO it loses fun points because I think you have to do a bit more tweaking of your deployments and attacks to balance your troops out, and also perhaps simply because I'm not nearly as practiced at it as I am with the standard 1v1 settings (older, old, and new).

On the balance, I'd say its a bit less fun than "Standard 1 v 1", but could probably be improved with a) some more testing and tweaking, and b) more practice. With those, I think it probably has potential to be slightly more fun than the current 0%SR "Strategic 1 v 1" template, simply because I think the big luck % would make for continual variety in the games, and one of the most common complaints about 0%SR is that games become too predictable and repetitive.

So, maybe on a slow day it might be a 'novelty template' to try out on something like WGL, but I don't expect it will add much to something like WGL, because at the end of the day it's almost an exact clone of "Strategic 1 v 1", just with a bit more variety.

Probably the thing to do would be to develop a new template (new map, distribution settings, etc.) featuring 100% luck in a much more creative way than I did. For example, I think it might work well if you used a medieval setting/map, where 100s or 1000s of armies/warriors actually *makes sense* realistically speaking.

Also, there may be other ways to fix the delay move issue. Two that have already been suggested are Semicedevine's idea of using no-split mode (honestly, I seem to recall hearing this suggestion earlier, as well, probably in the old thread), and szeweningen's idea of using different attacker/defender kill rates (higher attacker kill rate than defender kill rate, to promote 'attack first' as better than 'attack last').

I think to really make a good 'pure luck' template, you would have to explore those options and find a good overall combination. Then perhaps 'pure luck' could really shine its own unique light. My template is more of an experiment, not to see if it could shine, but just to see if it could stand up on its own two feet without falling apart horribly at the slightest poke.