Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

No, I mean they are very near useless at any stage of the game. Of course almost all low level summon share the problem of becoming obsolete very quicky, but shades are in a class of their own as far as wasting gems.

I'm not a 'mass armies' or 'sc' or 'stealth' player, I tend to use all of the above when available/useful. Shades are virtually useless against SCs, their low (vs. sc defense) attack stat and magic resistance negates weapon mean they almost never do anything. They simply die to the SC's damage shield in a couple rounds. For drawing fire, anything works as a decoy, and you can use junk that it is a lot less expensive.

If it is really an emergency where you are getting rushed and you need your early death gems to support your army, you are better off casting reanimate or revive wight. If you want to do stealth raiding, black servants are a far better choice, they can in some cases actually perform better than three shades, and finding undead stealth leadership for the shades is not easy/cheap. Trying to build up enough of them to do almost anything underwater is ridiculously expensive, and longdead from reanimate would perform better in most cases. Even all of that is mostly theoretical... the situations where you would use revive wight or reanimation are extremely rare, but when you do encounter them, they are certainly a better choice than shades.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Anything is a better choice than shades. Anything is a better choice than anything if you use them by themselves. But a simulation of shades mixed in slightly with other units does pretty well. Unless of course you have higher level units available with amphib, or stealth, or ethereal, or strngth sap.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Yes, and mixing any not very good unit with other stuff dilutes their suckiness, that doesn't really show anything. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

The abilities you list are either 'extras' (i.e ethereal doesn't isn't really a niche in itself, it's just nice to have, and on a weak and expensive unit it is just not nice enough alone), available easier and better other ways (amphibian and stealth) or just plain negligible (steal strength).

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

If you say so, I dont see it except in later units

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Well, I don't know what to say then. I've clearly pointed out better same-or-lower-level alternatives to all their niches (apart from steal strength, and it only takes a few combat tests to see how ineffective that is vs. almost anything).

I should also point out that the CB mod more than halved their price and they were still almost never used.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Doesn't necessarily mean it's a balance problem though. In fact, the whole shade debate kind of proved my point http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gifAny game which includes an advance system of some kind is going to get the same thing occuring, it often makes sense to ignore certain tiers of units simply because your resources would be better spent reaching the next tier. Simply because those units are obsolete doesn't mean they are unbalanced.
With any game that includes a gradual power increase you get the same effect. Of course people rushing to get the better, higher class units are going to do well - otherwise what would be the point in having a research tree at all?

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Right. Its like saying that the lower level skills in an RPG game is worthless because everyone pushes for higher levels.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Of course higher research spells are and should be better, but they are not perfectly so. My point was not 'shades suck because higher level stuff is better'. My examples, in fact, were of lower level spells.

By the same token, some high level spells are more than worth the research to get too, while others would barely be useful even if they were low level. Research cost can be a great balancer, but with so many spells it's silly to think it's perfectly applied everywhere.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

It kind of depends. One thing to consider is how the spell type effects this process - Shades may be weaker than other summons of the same level, but if you only took the Death path at creation you have no alternative, without a large outlay of resources to learn another path. To take something you said earlier: "The abilities you list are either 'extras', available easier and better other ways or just plain negligible. " Is it possible to get all of those abilities on a single unit? with a single selected path?
To be honest, comparing directly across spell lists is ignoring a huge factor of what goes into the balance of those lists. From the creation of your pretender your going to be paying for it - perhaps you'd be better off spending points on Dominion scales, or strength, or a better castle, or a better pretender. Then you need to consider the nation your using - will you start with access to gems of the path, or will you need to find a site which can give you those gems first? Can you afford to raise your paths with gems rather than paying for them at creation? Is it worth taking a specific path to make up for deficiencies in another (which leads on to multi-path spells, items available and similar).
You have imbalance on the one hand because, unlike chess, all of the choices a player makes are not equal. On the other, the balance is across the whole game rather than concentrating on a specific area - the choices the player can make are balanced, but only if the player understands the effect of those choices. It is possible for the player to ignore magic completely and go for a combat oriented pretender with hordes of troops, and still win.Or simply max out their Dominion strength and go for the dominion victory. Neither way is inherently imbalanced, each require different choices and offer different challenges. However, if a player doesn't know precisely what they're doing then it can lead to percieved imbalance. If the above mentioned combat player gets wiped out by the dominion player they may come to the conclusion that there is an imbalance in the way dominion works. However, what is more likely is that the combat player has made some poor choices in the creation of their nation/pretender, or simply don't know how to combat dominion spread - i.e. they don't fully understand how to play their chosen strategy.
This is why you get the experienced players ignoring certain units. It doesn't necessarily mean that those units are useless, imbalanced or obsolete. It's more to do with the player understanding enough about how the game works to know that those particular units or choices are not the best (or most required) compliment to the strategy (or what they are attempting to achieve). These units will change depending on what the player wants to achieve - what is ignored in one strategy may play a central role in another. Units which never see the light of day in multiplayer may be indispensable in single player. Simply because most players ignore a particular unit does not necessarily point to a problem with that unit, it may simply be that nobody has found a strategy which would suit the particular unit.

Re: Starvation victims abroad need help NOW!
 

Actually, all of the examples I gave were using death magic.

While it's true many combinations of abilities/stats can allow the application of unique strategies, it's a matter of cost. The whole point of balance is insuring that a variety of strategies get into play, since at the first go at pricing things are naturally not all at similar levels of cost effectiveness. They don't need to be perfectly so, it's not really possible anyway, but they need to be comparably effective for the price or the entire strategy will just get pushed aside. It is certainly the case that a player that is skilled/familiar with their strategy can still win with one that that is less cost effective, but like everything else, it's a matter of degree. Someone who trained all their life with a bow and arrow could probably easily beat someone who just picked up a gun for the first time in their life, but that doesn't make the weapons 'balanced'. If you pit people very familiar with both weapons against each other, they are going to end up picking the same one. The nice thing about a game rather than reality though, you can give each option a unique advantage (it doesn't have to be a direct advantage, it could be something as simple as price, if the incentive is enough).

I think we agree that almost everything has possibilities to be used in a strategy, the hang up is just that some strategies can be employed far more effectively than others with the same resources available. That, and sometimes units/spells/items are simply so similar to each other they need some tweaks to find their own unique niche.