m4rt1n
Adept
To be a lone contrarian voice I think that the Spire is fun and good value - but I say that as a hardcore fighter who fights Tournament to ~4k-6k most weeks.
The Squad Sizes are bigger than people are used to in the Tournament, that is true. However in a Tournament province you fight 4 battles to get 1 prize. In the Spire every single encounter gives you a prize. So to compare apples with apples divide the Spire SS by 4 and its comparable. Thus if SS in Spire is 3x your regular SS then comparing it to Tournament the SS is equivalent to the 15th province.
I manual fight the spire for some of them, but losses are impossible to avoid when you start getting a 2nd and 3rd wave using your first set of troops and have varying opponents of sometimes 4 or more differing troop types. Even with careful manual fighting I lose over 50% of troops on those.