Sure, ok let's move away from sports and use billiards as an example or perhaps darts, or maybe chess is a better example. Anyway you cut it, if you want to get better at something you need to practice at it. Strategy games like this require you to plan, attack, evaluate your attacks, learn from the mistakes and try again to see if you can do better. The part that is missing currently is the try again part. You claim that attacking the same base you fail on does not allow you to learn. Here is where you are missing a key piece of information. If you just attack the same base over and over again without analysing why things went wrong and making adjustments accordingly then you would be right. But if you use that as a tool to learn why things went wrong then you are much less likely to make the same mistakes when you do it again.
Besides that the challenge of tackling a base you have trouble can be one of the most exciting things in the game. So to say that practicing a skill in a game no longer makes it a game is a ridiculous argument.




