Fate, I thank you for your evaluation of the mod. I'm glad to hear there are some others playing it aside from rdonj
It's nice you think races are somewhat balanced (with help of Rdonj I hope we got them withing the range of balance that vanilla dominions has.. since those nations aren't that balanced I hope we got there now)
I think the air bless is probably way overpowered in the mod (anti missile weapon spells have been increased in cost but I can't make the air bless more expensive or less effective)
I might need to decrease the number of holy units on the insects or do something about incentive to get Hive or Swarm, maybe remove ranged attack from Nest?
The powerfull indies are meant to put on the map to make some province harder to take as in scenario maps. I think I need to use space Eels and spacestations less perhaps
(Rdonj plz take his comment in account with your mapping
)
The Orcs shapeshifting of heroes has given me lots of replies like yours, the IDEA was
1. I could get a lower recruitment cost and after shapechange a higher upkeep. I can also change recruitment cost and upkeep separately now which I thought would give me more options for balancing (IMHO balancing races which are about domsummons etc is hard.)
2. It simulates somewhat the rising of commanders from the ranks by skill
all in all there is indeed no reason not to shapeshift them though.
The commonwealth only just got their AP weapons, before that they where even worse, same for dragons.. I hope they both are better now, commonwealth has very good shields against ranged weapons and that should help them. I think your reply about AP or less means you use an older version of the mod (from time to time I change a lot in short notice) so that could also be why your dragons are not as strong as they are now.. I hope.
Maybe upload the latest version.. and DL the nation Souls of Shiar which I've released seperately it's the undead nation for this mod and I'll put in in later after some balancing (like dragons it uses no spaceforms so cann be used for dom 3 vanilla and releasing it seperately has 2 things I like about it: non dom 3K players might try it and dragons certainly got much more feedback)