[Saber Cherry]

Tuidjy said:
Ghost Riders are overrated. In my current game, I am overruning C'tis, and he
most certainly has access to Ghost Riders. He used quite a few in the first
turns of the invasion, but what he got was three attacks on one man province
defenses, one or two attacks against SCs that slaughtered the riders, and a few
attacks against mage squads that wiped out the wraith lords, and then mopped up
the riders.

That example...

In that game I am using ONE army of troops. It is made out of more than
a hundred range units, and a mass of banes, wraiths and heavy Abysian infantry.
Their commander has the Gatestone, generates fire gems, and cast 'Flame arrows'
and his 'assistant' SC wears the boots of the planes. It is a great reaction
force, because it can jump around, and be gone even before ghost riders hit.
Not that it always does, of course. It has withstood up to five simultaneous
'ghost rides' with only a few casualties.

...and that example...

...are both irrelevant. Are B-52s weak and ineffective because they didn't win the Vietnam War? No. Sniper rifles, because blind people can't use them? No. Example of devastating weapons used ineffectively do not indicate that they are ineffective or overrated. Perhaps your opponent should invest in scouts?

The problem many people seems to have is that it is insane to rely on vanilla
troops by turn 40.

Yes, I do have a problem with that. It's a fundamental game flaw, IMO, and I'm trying to reduce it, so that the game can be less "Tech Race" like Age of Empires and more "Strategy and Tactics" like real history (prior to WW2). Good fantasy novels also have limits on power. How interesting would the Lord of the Rings be if Sauron skipped the "Build up an army of Orcs" part, since he had level 9 research (and thus, relying on them was insane), and just destroyed the world with long-range magical bombing?

Anything put together with a ounce of thought will wipe out
melee troops. Get rid of Ghost Riders, Wrathful skies, False Horrors and
Super combatants, and I will still be wiping out your groundpounders every time
they are outside of a castle/dome.

If it only takes an ounce of thought to render half of the game irrelevant, even with the most overpowered and commonly-abused spells removed, that's not a good thing. That's a bad thing.

Those who whine about a specific aspect of the game have simply not felt the
sting of other strategies. If they get their way and see their peeve du jour
castrated, they will get slapped with something else, and they will keep
whinning until Dominions II looks and plays like a turnbased Rome: Total War.

Sorry I like to whine, but I prefer it to insulting people. Your last... well, it's not really an argument, just a chance to denigrate people who disagree with you. If Ghost Riders was 1 gem and needed level 1 death magic, virtually everyone would agree that it was undercosted and overpowered... yet your last paragraph would still apply, and thus it is irrelevant. Of course, nerfing something that is so powerful that it dominates gameplay will cause people to start using other strategies. That's the whole point! It makes the game better and more interesting. If the late game is dominated by 5% of the units and spells since they are vastly superior to other uses of resources, and making those 5% expensive enough that they are similar in efficiency to next-best 10% of units and spells... you end up with an end-game where people can effectively use 15% of the units and spells without people like you calling them insane. That makes the end-game three times as rich and three times as good. And, just possibly, it could force people to use more than an ounce of thought to counter experienced elite national melee units. Would that really be such a bad thing?