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quantum_mechani said:
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.
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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.