And another thing...

[Truper]

In Dom1, archers and Blackhawks only decimated naked mages. A little armor, a couple bodyguards, and the problem was solved. If you wanted to use mages on the battlefield, you needed to put some thought into protecting them. Have you ever seen anyone forge, say, a weightless scale mail in Dom2? My guess would be no, since there is no need for what that item was intended as: a cheap way to give a mage some protection.

One of the reasons that battlefield magic dominates the game to the extent that very hard research has become popular is that mages can't be attacked. Tactics like Skeleton Spam drive me insane. Suppose you expect to face a group of Sauromancers. You have a substantial group of cavalry, so you deploy them on a flank, and order them to attack rear. What will happen? The cavalry will move forward, then madly ride around the battlefield slaughtering the Skeletons which can't really hurt them, until eventually they become exhausted and overwhelmed. Even if their mad spree of bone-smashing happens to bring them near a Sauromancer, will they put a lance through its black heart? No! Troops will attack anything *but* mages, unless there is nothing but mages left on the battlefield.

Something that might perhaps be done about this is to give troops a better sense of what the real threat is. If a knight in shining armor was 3 squares away from a Skeleton in one direction, and 3 squares from a Sauromancer in another, it would be awfully nice if he'd attack the Sauromancer. I have no idea if this could be done.