Pre-release Outwitters

[Kamikaze28]

(07-09-2012 05:11 PM)The430nsT0rn Wrote:  

(07-09-2012 04:59 PM)Kamikaze28 Wrote:  One very late 'experiment' in beta was to reduce the standard Wits/round from 5 to 3 and add 2 Wit Spaces to every map - and yes, that meant 4 Wit spaces per side on the bigger maps. It turned the game into a turf war which was oftentimes won 15 moves before it actually was over due to the shift in Wits per player.

Huh, that's very interesting. I have wondered if there was ever more wit spaces, or what it would be like to have more, whether it would be good or bad. I also noticed in JosueCuervo's Super-Titan match, that he made it a point to acquire the available wit spaces before making his push, reinforcing the idea to me that wit acquisition is indeed very important.

As a long-term strategy, it definitely is. If you're destroying the base 2 turns anyway, conquering the Wit Spaces doesn't do you that much good.
In the above experiment however, losing a Wit Space was the first step to defeat. Once you lose 2 Spaces, it is already very hard to recover - lose all 3 Wit Spaces and you're pretty much done as you only get 3 Wits/turn. The games were very much a territorial push and pull and as you can tell by the release version, the decision was made to go back to 5 basic Wits and 1/2 Wit Spaces on a map.

In early screenshots, you can also see a truly neutral Wit Space in the center of maps. That happened before I joined the beta, but it came up during the experiment. It suffered basically from the same problem - whoever controlled the neutral Wit Space won the game in the long run due to slowly building up more Wits than the other player. Controlling/holding that central Wit Space was everything but optional.