I run 150% HP and 240$ mage and light range each week. (2 weeks of tournament per set of 150/240/240
But when we look at elvenstats we see plenty of weeks where he gets a 1-4K score, so he can pile up squads and boosters during that time and deploy them in a few weeks where he pushes to insanity.
Thats why making any claim in any shape or form from the results of a blue monday power play make any sense.
Even the dumbest monkey can save recources for multiple weeks and then get a massive result by unleashing all those resources in that 1 week. it would be a bad thing if a one time powerpush would not beat a "normal" tournament player.
Also not counted is the massive unit loss required for a 20520 tournament, (tho manual play can mitiligate much of it in marble tournament, much less in steel, but I see him do the same in silk+elixer, where you cannot mitiligate it anywhere resonable)
I have monitored my losses so many times now, the first 30 provinces you are like, that wasn't much losses, then the next 5 it increases and the next 5 it gets even more and once you get past 40 it kinda snowballs. you will often see losses of 500 squads or more for 5-10 provinces.
Here we talk about 76 provinces, the losses for the last 10, provincies are most likely in the 1000-2000 squads range if not more.
So there is no way you can sustain that without putting in more than you can every remake in a single week. (or 2)
I did 20k on steel too and I have to say that you are right. This time I lost a lot more squads than on marble. I did not play many manual though, because I wanted to finish it before my booster buildings expire. What really makes this hard that in the new tournament my archers are very weak compared to the old ones and this tournament needed mostly light ranged. I placed only 3 ELRs previously, I had to use diamonds to get a 4th one, which did not make a big difference. I needed 2-3 more ELRs and some more health boosters. I had the health boosters, but I rather kept them for the FA.
Another issue I already noticed that heavy ranged are almost completely useless after province 50. They barely damage anything. What I normally do is supporting my light ranged or mage units with frogs, but here the more frogs I add, the more units I lose on auto. On manual I still use frog to reduce the damage hellhound is causing, but even with 3 frogs I cannot kill a single hellhound, which is ridiculous. I'll upgrade my TT, maybe that gives some extra damage.
As of the 30-40k, I still think it was possible when I did 2x18900, because I placed 2.5x as many health and damage boosters for those tournaments, and the enemy barely scratched my units. Another thing, that those tournaments were a lot better for mages, so I was able to almost completely avoid damage with 5 blossoms or 5 banshees. Here the archers always ran forward and got damaged and when I used mages they were damaged by enemy mages too. After I used up my junk archer units and the sorceress became useless with 2-3 squad loss, I played mostly with 5 rangers and 5 blossoms. Both have low health, that's why I losed many of them. Usually 0-1.5 squads per tent. I used rarely 5 banshees, but they are not that great against enemy mages. Sometimes I used dryad too, because they have better health, which is good against enemy light ranged.
I lost 1400 squads total, which is almost twice as the 750 on marble. :S
I'll do around 20k again on the FA week.