Do you find SEAD or SE1W more luck based?
Do you find SEAD or SE1W more strategical?

re: #1) "luck based" is not a property of the template itself but of the player base. A chess competition among roughly-equal-skill grandmasters will have greater "% luck" than a poker competition among the general population, because skill matters more the more it varies within the competitor pool.

Among good players, SEAD will have more outcomes decided by luck (advantaged/disadvantaged starts). Among all players, SEAD will give a greater advantage to players with tactical know-how (less "luck based") because every start is winnable when your opponent doesn't understand the template. SE1W boards are more likely than SEAD boards to result in obviously solved games (tic-tac-toe style, where any two players who grasp a handful of basic insights will play at roughly the same level).

If you want a meaningful concept of "luck based" for a game, you need to define something like VC-dimension: an upper bound on possible variation in skill- but even that's incomplete because much of that variation could come from trivial insights (e.g., imagine a game of go but with a particular sequence of moves that results in an instant win- you'll have high variance in skill but much of this will result from a binary about whether players can learn the instant-win trick.)

I think this line of thinking for reasoning about skill in games is a dead end.

re: #2) SEAD has more strategic merit than SE1W, owing to its greater strategic depth.

LD Siege

With luck based I mean how nondeterministic is a game of two perfect players:
For example in chess, there is no luck involved, if both sides play perfectly we will know who will win (or if there is a draw).
In a coin toss (assuming the coin is fair regardless of how you toss the coin), both sides have a 50% chance to win, assuming "perfect play".

in SE1W is rare that luck decides it. If Aus or SA have the wasteland sometimes the player getting the other one as 1st can have a good advantage. Normally are games that best player prevails.
In SEAD luck has much more impact, if u get a random territory in Asia and another one in north europe for example its very likely that other player will have SA and/or Aus. A better player can lose just because of that.

What is even the meaning of "strategical"?

Both SE templates are "simple". The problem with simple is that this implies them being unforgiving. I do honestly not really understand why SE is so popular among newer players and frowned upon by more of the "elite" crowd. I guess the former is only because of it being closest to risk. If I wanted to just throw some armies around, especially SE1W is the absolute worst template I can think off since games can easily get decided here by the opponent having 1 single army more in the correct position.

That's why the bomb template is so nice :) It is way more forgiving than the other SE templates.

With luck based I mean how nondeterministic is a game of two perfect players:

This model doesn't work. Two perfect players will be evenly matched in every regard and thus the game would be decided entirely by luck (starting position).

But if we're talking about luck as in the predictability of outcome among good players, then SE1W is more strategic. SEAD is more likely to give one player a significant starting advantage.

Hey, "SEAD pro" is here!

SEAD forces you to guess more things, that are not under control of any player (initial territories, initial moves derived from initial territories).
SE1W while may be more "luck determined" when distributing start positions in certain wastelands configurations. And even in those situations, you can try to mitigate the outcomes by min-maxing decisions. Besides that and thus "generally" you only need to guess stuff, that is under opponent's control and is derived from "expected" input conditions.
Also SE1W seems simpler in general, as the map with wastelands does simplify the board-oriented options.

So, I would guess SEAD is more luck based, while SE1W is more strategic.

Probably someone might do the statistics research from the WZ API games. (I won't do, cuz I am too lazy)

Probably someone might do the statistics research from the WZ API games. (I won't do, cuz I am too lazy)

You mean that SEAD is more luck based? The highest QM rating on SE1W is almost 500 points lower than the one on SE. Both templates are heavily played. The QM rating is no Elo but this is still a very telling sign that SEAD has more luck involved in that upsets are more likely.

Sorry, I don't understand the idea (or may be there was a typo in the original message "The highest QM rating on SE1W is almost 500 points lower than the one on SE").

May you please elaborate on this.
The highest QM ratings for various templates are:

Template - Top-1 - Top 50
SEAD - 1090 - 814
SE1W - 1553 - 859
SECB - 1000 - 573
S1v1 - 1396 - 798
Duel Lotto - 634 - 405

While I generally understand the idea, that lower top ratings are a signal of a more luck based play, but then...We have SE1W ratings higher than those of S1v1; and SECB < SEAD.

The argument is that a higher skill template will tend to have greater variance in its rating distribution than a lower-skill one.

SEAD is the most-played template, since it's unlocked the earliest, so given the dynamics of QM it should have an advantage in getting higher max ratings (due to more play, higher overall points [QM is inflated and converges slowly]). Instead, we see Shadow Demon (Ozjis) was able to run up the score way more on SE1W than SEAD. This could be (likely is) because he's able to maintain a higher win rate at a top rating on SE1W than on SEAD, where he's more likely to lose to much weaker players due to simple bad luck.

Due to limitations in QM, we can't really extend this as a general methodology, but between SEAD & SE1W this makes a strong point.

Edited 10/16/2022 00:46:52

Yeah, typo, I meant SEAD's max rating is 500 points lower than SE1W's max rating. Apart from that, l4.r0v has explained everything.

Edited 10/16/2022 01:07:20

The tactical diversity on both templates is extremely low, often there is one single way of playing correctly. It's a different experience than other strategic templates, to put it neutrally. As a general rule, better players will win more consistently with manual picks than automatic picks with everything else being similar, as auto dist is another layer of randomness.