Battle Afflication

[General Tacticus]

Originally posted by PrinzMegaherz:
As it is, the game is unbalanced.
Mage pretenders are always useful. You can leave them in your capital to research and cast, or you can send them into secure areas to search for sites. Anyway, their usefullness does not decrease by doing their job.
On the other hand, combat pretenders will get afflictions over time, there is no way to prevent this. This makes them less usefull in most cases.

In my oppinion every pretender, at least the not human ones, should have some kind of immortal ability that makes them heal their afflictions themselves over time.

What you say is partly true, however you combat pretender has probably boosted your starting expansion far above what any mage pretender could do. And he probably cost you less design points to begin with.
A mage pretender is a long term investment, he won't pay off until after quite a bit of time. The combat pretender starts paying at once, but will need some help to stay useful. With the right equipment and the right magic support, you can keep using him to the end. Two different kind of investment, two different rewards, also different risks. It all balances out.

Oh, and I would LOVE to be able to send my mage pretenders with my main armies. They could do wonderfull things on the battlefield. But they would not survive. So instead, I leave them at home, doing what two or three normal mages could do just as well (research spells, search for magic sites). In a sense, I get less out of them than you do out of your combat pretender, much less even untill they are ready for the big ritual spells. And you could easily pull back the combat pretender from your armies at that time, empower him a little, give him good items, and make it an extra-tough pretender.

So I do not think pretenders are unbalanced. Each ones has strength and weaknesses, and that is balanced by their cost. There are even a few "immortal" ones. You just have to remembers that pretenders in this game are not yet Gods ! They can't win you the game by themselves, they are not invincible; they can just help along their chosen people to spread their faith.