Note -- I've been thinking about this for a while, and this seemed like a relevant place to put this.
It's late and I'm gonna post this, but I may very likely come back later and edit it once I'm awake.It might help to describe strategies by their resource plan re: the three major resources -- damage, actions and manna -- and the types of investments it makes.
Consider Piousflea's Lord of Terror Warlock build. Piousflea calls it a beatdown build in his writeup, but relknes would probably categorize it as a Few Big strategy.
That build spends a lot of actions in the beginning on movement to close the distance to the enemy, while saving up manna. It makes use of Cheetah speed and shift enchantment as cheep action investments with immediate payoff to fuel the initial movement action expenditure.
Then it dramatically makes a big manna payment and tries to end the game as soon as possible by efficiently spending all actions and manna on attacks or attack improvements. There are no long term investments in this strategy. All investments must pay off faster than any slower investments the opponent might have made while the Beatdown mage was moving.
I think we should describe this sort of Few Big strategy as:
[ul]
[li]Near term
damage payout[/li]
[li]Minimal investment of
manna or
actions in
manna generators[/li]
[li]Efficient investment of
actions and high investment of
manna in
action generators[/li]
[li]No higher order investments of resources in
action generator-generators or
mana generator-generators[/li]
[/ul]
I'll explain. In this model, the most basic currency in the game is damage. Above damage are the twin currencies of manna and actions. Above those are manna generators and action generators. Above those are manna generator-generators and action generator-generators and so on. I'll give some examples:
[ul]
[li]Manna generators are things like Manna Crystals and Manna Flowers. [/li]
[li]Action generators are usually creatures.[/li]
[li]Manna generator-generators are more rare. Fella casting harmonize on herself and your mage and your Lair would be an example of a manna generator-generator. [/li]
[li]Action generator-generators are things like spawn points which can be used to create creatures, which themselves generate actions.[/li]
[/ul]
Note that Fellella is both an action generator and a manna generator as well as a potential manna generator-generator. Goblin Builders are action generators without being manna generators (no channeling stat). They're action generator-generators if they're used to build conjurations that can act (either attack some other action that can be converted to damage), and they could even be action-generator-generator-generators if they could build multiple barracks.
All this generator-generator-generator talk is getting kind of complicated. Lets talk about these things as a "Order". Damage is a 0 order resource; it's what resources are ultimately converted into. Manna and Actions are 1st order resources; they're the things that are converted into damage. Creatures and manna conjurations are 2nd order resources. They're the things that produce 1st order resources. Spawn points and some familiars are 3rd order resources (Huginn is only a 2nd order resource, and so are the Psy familiars)
Your mage, of course, is the generator-generator-generator-infinity+1. Anything that you invest in comes out of your mage or some other investment your mage made. If some day they print an enchantment that spits out creature spawners, the mage will still be the impetus. Of course, the mage also generates 2 quick actions every turn and a tremendous amount of manna, and needs to be considered an exceptionally powerful 2nd order resource as well as a potential resource at order n+1.
As an aside, Spellbooks are not an investment type resource. It may be best to think of them as order 0, or as a top level n resource, from which all other resource generation comes from, or just as a completely orthogonal resource. Cards in the spellbook are either depleted or preserved (and very rarely restored) but never generated. If damage is work, and manna and actions are solar and wind sources of renewable power, then spellbooks are a non-renewable fossil fuel like crude oil. Wands are a way to preserve the spellbook resource, so they're maybe a 1st order spellbook resource, too.
Enchantments that deal damage like Magebane or Ghoul Rot would be 1st order resources in this system (if that matters?) on a par with manna or actions. They create damage.
Anyway, why does all this 1st order 2nd order stuff matter? Generally, the higher order an investment is, the more powerful it is, and consequently (because Mage Wars is a well balanced game) the more expensive it is and the longer it takes to pay off. A 15 manna Lair is only going to create damage indirectly through creatures which will create actions, and so is less immediately valuable than a 5 manna Bitterwood Fox. But if you leave a Lair in play long enough it will create lots of Foxes which will create lots and lots of actions which will create lots and lots of damage.
To return to piousflee's Lord of Terror build, he's relying on the initial starting manna and the pre-existing 2nd order resource of the Warlock himself to build a very expensive action generator (Adramelech, Lord of Fire) because Adramelech is also one of the most action efficient damage generators in the game.
This explains why Few Big does so well against Beatdown. Few Big is efficiently more invested in actions than Beatdown (Beatdown hasn't got any action generators except maybe Battle Fury or Whirling Strike on a Mage Wand or Helm of Gothos). Because Few Big has an easy time recovering its investments against Beatdown, it tends to dominate.
As I see it, the reasons Few Big can recover its investments vs Beatdown are
[ul]
[li]The investments are only modestly larger than the dominated strategy[/li]
[li]The investments are efficient and take advantage of natural sweet-spots[/li]
[li]The investments are well targeted[/li]
[li]Actions are more scarce than manna[/li]
[/ul]
In this case, I mean that Lord of Terror only invests in one action generator, compared to Beatdown's zero investments. Avoiding over-investment is key. Further, the investments LoT makes are in good, powerful cards that are probably at the outer edge of the balance window. And finally, the investments hit the metagame at the right spot. High power flyers are valuable metagame pieces that have the potential to Just Win.
The important reason that high investment strategies don't always beat low investment strategies is that a low investment strategy can trade off its own low order resources for the opponent's high order resources. A creature can kill a spawnpoint. Manna and an action can be used to cast an incantation or attack spell (making that spell a transformed 1st level resource, because it's not going to stick around) and that spell can have an immediate adverse effect on the opponent's investment. Trading low order resources for high order resources can be great because the high order resources tend to be more expensive (again, because that's how Mage Wars is balanced.)
Finally, lets look at relknes's categories again:
conjurations (temples, mana crystals, Mordok's Obelisk, etc.) are dominated by Beatdown
Beatdown is dominated by Few Big
Few Big is dominated by Control
Control is dominated by swarm
Swarm is dominated by conjurations
Some of these interactions are just related to the balance of the different resources, but for example, the reason Control is dominated by Swarm is that Swarm makes a heavy investment in action generators while Control makes a heavy investment in manna Generators, and, in that matchup, actions scale faster than manna.
The control mage starts channeling 10 manna a turn, and gets 2 actions. That's 5 manna/action. 2 Manna flower equivalents and a Gate to Voltari will keep this ratio the same (15/3), or 5 manna flower equivalents will nudge it up to approximately +50%. This costs aprox 25 manna, and between 3 and 5 actions.
The Swarm mage scales much faster because each creature only takes 1 action to summon and pays for itself the next turn. Summoning just a single creature is a +50% increase in actions available.
Against a Big Few strategy, Control can use its lower order resources (actions, order 1) against the opponent's higher order resources (action generators, creatures, order 2) and because the Big Few strategy isn't equipped to take advantage of the superior scaling in creatures vs. manna, the Control player can live long enough to see a return on his or her more powerful investment.
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