Yeah Empire Wars just gives less room for strategic variety and can turn the game into a micro war, removing a lot of depth. It's just not the same and for me is clearly inferior to RM. IMO the three biggest tournaments of the year so far are NAC3, HC3 and KOTD3 - you could make an argument for any of them being the biggest/ best and for different reasons. For what it's worth, I reckon I've personally enjoyed KOTD the most because there've been so many compelling narratives, Arabia's a great map and we've seen really nice variety in terms of civ match-ups. Can completely see why someone else would go another way though and the calendar is better for having all of these different types of events!Both were awesome, but for me personally EW is quite obviously inferior to RM.
I mean, can one really claim after watching Lierrey vs Hera (just as an example) where small mistakes in Dark Age ended up deciding games that Dark Age is boring and irrelevant?