First of all, this is LND’s post, and Alex isn’t much of a bully. That was a little hurtful when all Alex tries to do is explain. Maybe a little hubris sprinkled in, but more or less a joke. Airlift will never be strategic, but of course you’re welcome to your thoughts?
Strategic = Fun, but Fun =/= Strategic

Chris might be right tho, cos if Fogless Fighting is considered strategic by Alexclusive, it may not be a far stretch!! ;)

I believe the bet would also be difficult to formulate, as the deeper details about the question at hand, what makes a template qualify for strategic, are controversial to a certain extent. Even if we pick a criteria like "better players win out", we would need to agree on how much winning out is enough. For example, if it's enough that better players perform better in any way, then Small Earth Auto Distribution would be a strategic template. Maybe that's a key reason why it's so difficult to achieve consensus about strategic templates in grey area cases even among indiciduals that are knowledgeable about the topic.

What the strategic community generally agees on is that there are grey areas. More and less strategic templates.

Sumo is a great example actually, because I would contest the statement that it's a strategic template, but I know very good players who wouldn't

you saying my example is automatically wrong because 5 people in the forum have a different opinion is the definition of close minded.

the only logic that's been presented as to why airlifts can't be strategic is that some people say it's less strategic to have a card implemented before attacks. in that vein, are reinforcement cards also not strategic?

imo, you just have to adjust your strategy, but it's still strategic. a strategically used airlift can change the tide of the game, much like a strategically used blockade. but if the opponent has properly strategized to account for a possible airlift, they can mitigate the effect.

nobody's asking you to start using airlifts if you don't like them, but I don't see how you can argue that anyone else's preferred template requires no strategy just because it's not what you like to use.

our clan usually has 4-5 tournaments going at a time if you ever want to try playing the game our way. you might even enjoy it!

The difference in airlifts and reinforcements is that reinforcements are of a fixed value (either flat number, progressive by turn number or progressive by territories held). Airlifts could come from anywhere and have completely unknown size.

Maybe we can achieve the compromise that if any better performance of stronger than weaker players was to be considered enough to declare a template strategic, airlift cards would be allowable. But within that definition, we come back to the point someone said earlier, that you can consider right about anything strategic, especially anything that doesn't violate Warzone physics. For the reason alone that some players know more about it than others, even everything else ignored.

Well then I suppose AWP officials disagree with the whole airlift isn't strategic. Or sumo is a thing cause the awp templates aren't exclusively strategic.

Regardless, i hope i get the chance again in the future to place an already won bet

What so many people have been trying to tell you is that airlift cards, no matter the details of the template, will always decrease the strategic value of a template, in the sense that better players will win less than without the airlift card. This is because it increases randomness without, other than WR for example, backing it up by increased tactical depth the template would otherwise not have.

This is also the only commonly accepted definition of strategic depths - the more consistently better players beat weaker players, the more of it it has. And this is also what forces a controversial grey area into existence.

That's a way to prove that WR is not unstrategic. Let's take an unstrategic template in the purest sense of the word - Pirate Duel. Better players will win exactly half, weaker players will win exactly half. This proves that there is no strategy. Let's say the example at the other extreme end would be chess (better player will win out, even if only very slightly better).

Of course there is plenty of room in between and little at the extremes. If a WR template was less strategic than a SR template in general, it would make better players win less than they do on exactly the same template with SR settings. This does not happen; in fact, for most skill levels except ultra elite, the opposite happens.

but I don't see how it's "random". sure, it changes value based on income, but increasing income is part of the strategy on any template. you're rewarded for taking advantage of it and punished for not accounting for it in your strategy, which is true of any settings adjustment

People draw the line from which strategic depths onwards the word "strategic" is aporopriate, that's where disagreements arise. But nobody who truly understood the discussion would for example call WR unstrategic, because that can be proven wrong immediately. That's why I started off ironic, because the speaker clearly didn't understand the question. But now that I hurt their feelings, I took the time to explain it step by step.

There is no tactical reason to play an airlift card in the way A rather than B, because the only thing you want to do is make an opponent's stack (ideally a smaller one) run into it. Whether you succeed or not will often decide the game, but not because the winner played better, but because he guessed correctly where the stack will move. As the effect of this randomness is very large and the skill requirement to use the card correctly is extremely low (understanding attack and defense kill rates), it is physically impossible to add an airlift card without decreasing the strategic depth.

(Excluding fabricated scenarios, like adding an airlift card to Pirate Duel or assuming both players are extremely mentally challenged and can't comprehend how to use the card.)

Can't really tackle the opposite, haven't played sumo, not even once.
but I agree with everything in the last 3 posts.

less and more strategic are vague terms. Emergency blockades and bombs also introduce some randomness. random move order also introduces randomness. can we quantify this and proudly say airlift wouldn't or would introduce more? there's already at least 1 template with it. a very weird one but there is.

maybe by having 0 weight on airlift cards, or by offering too many of them, you negate this randomness. I don't know. but the implementation of the above and other random inducing settings is direct proof that airlift could fit in that grey area in the future

EDIT: this was after your "That's a way to prove that WR is not unstrategic." post. Had not read the rest

EDIT: if you are talking about wr due to me saying i hate it. Remember i said i hate it. Not that i find it unstrategic. Its a preference

Edited 11/10/2023 15:22:54

that's false, airlifts are mostly used to allow your teammate with low income to contribute to the attack and not die. they can be helpful if you correctly predict where the stack will go, but at the core they are used for offense, not defense

Before answering, I actually considered the scenario that a template has effectively infinite airlift cards, so that any army can move anywhere. But as even in this example, there is no added strategic depth, it must lead to the same result.

Could it be that you are talking about a game setting that is like a diplo, QueefBalls? There, what you are describing could be a fun setting. When I used to play diplos in the past, I also liked adding airlift cards.

we don't do diplos but we always use airlifts in our team games.

the basic premise being that as teammates we should always have the ability to assist each other. the airlift allows us to coordinate distribution so that if one of us gets into a jam and we don't have fronts that are adjacent to each other, we can strategically transfer troops to one another. and as we plan our attack, we know that our opponents have the same ability. so you just have to plan accordingly

Then you are not using the airlift card correctly/in the most effective way. If you want, you can play a team game against me and I will show you?

Even in the scenario closest to using the airlift card this way (saving the teammate from elimination), if you play correctly, you'll use a transfer move instead.

There can be a scenario where you use the airlift card that way anyways without being wrong (e. g. that teammate being in an isolated area of the map), but on an otherwise strategic template, this will without a doubt be less than 1% of the uses of the card if used correctly. While the "damage" in strategic depth (how many games are decided by the added randomness) will be extreme.