Puzzles #228, #229 & #230 - Virgo (Star Battle Sudoku)

As much as it's not my favorite thing to solve, I knew for the Puzzle Zodiac I should include some sort of Sudoku puzzle. So when browsing variants I spotted Star Battle Sudoku and thought that it would be a perfect fit, merging number placement and object placement into one puzzle. For the puzz.link interfaces, the highest placeable number(s) represent stars, and the solution should contain (1-5 and 1 star) or (1-7 and 2 stars) in every row, column and region with no stars sharing an edge or corner.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

For the example puzzle, my goal was to make sure that it was fairly easy. To that end, I placed an S into the givens because why not?

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzle 11 on the test, worth 20 points, and nicknamed "5 star confusion". This is a puzzle that just kind of ended up working out, as I placed in some numbers arbitrarily and deduced as much as I could, which was most of the grid. My only goal was to have 5 and star disambiguated by the Star Battle touching constraint, and this was free points for most people.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzle 12 on the test, worth 50 points, and themed on the Virgo sign. It took me a very long time to hit on an arrangement of givens that looked like Virgo, and even once I did I had way too many givens to make an interesting puzzle and I kept running into dead ends. Eventually I removed some givens and tried moving the symbol around the grid before finally hitting on this arrangement. The rest of the fill took a bit of work to resolve, too. Ultimately any sudoku contest regulars blasted through this puzzle in no time and often earned over 20 points per minute. Does that mean it was overvalued? I don't think so- I balanced the points around more general puzzle people, which means that anyone who specializes in a type would earn more points per minute, compared to making a couple puzzles bad points per minute for most people.