Excessive mage nerfing in dom-III (?)

[Tyrant]

Whenever i get a new game and go looking for the path to Ulitimate Power i start my search with four things- flight, invisability, life drain, and speed. The nature of these powers makes them hard to balance, and smart game designers are right to examine them closely. Wraith's post is very articulate, and I understand his worry, yet I do think he jumped the gun. Life drain did need a nerf, and quickness was at least worth a hard look since it makes the quickened unit twice as good, more or less.

In a game as wide as this one, true balance is not a realitic goal. Better goals are to try to make sure that there are many viable strategies and few useless features. DomII did a fine job on the first, and the second is less important.

Now here is my worry about balance in 3. Sounds like differntiating the nations was a big design goal, and that ups the ante on balance issues. In DomII there was an evolution during a given game away from your store bought troops and mages such that if you made it to the late game you likely had a little of nearly everything. If that's less true in 3 it raises the chances of bad match ups (ie there's a counter to your enemies plan, but you can't do it), and means that new nation stuff itself needs to be thouroughly thought out and tested.