Flyers and cavalry are OP, archers and regular melee mostly suck, other balance issues

[Division By Zero]

I've previously played through the original AoW campaign and a few of the maps (received the original AoW as a gift on Good Old Games) and I would almost say the original is better balanced and better designed than this one.

AoW Shadow Magic largely skews the balance in favor of cavalry and fast fliers. While those were very effective and somewhat resembling overpowered in the original, they're near-mandatory in AoW: Shadow Magic (in an e-sport they would be called meta).

First, the combat grid and the adventuring grid use the same movement speed on each unit. This means that using slow units will hamper your movement on the adventuring grid, effectively relegating those units to garrison and patrol duty. My experience is that using units with a movement speed below 32 in the main offensive force puts you at a serious disadvantage.

The transition from the original AoW to Shadow Magic nerfs the movement speed of the fast-moving factions, particularly the Archons. In the original, Archon foot soldiers moved quickly enough that you could put them in a main offensive force and they wouldn't slow you down too badly, and their cavalry could probably outrun a motorcycle with a well-placed Haste enchant. AoW: Shadow Magic nerfs their movement down to something more standard. There doesn't seem to be much point to using most basic-level units when flyers and cavalry can almost always do the same thing that melee does, only better.

Melee has even more problems with sieges. While AoW: Shadow Magic allows any unit to attack garrison walls (as opposed to the original where you had to bring a specifically designated type of attack that damages walls), all too often your melee will get blocked and bottlenecked right after breaking the door, leaving the rest of the melee behind it ineffective.

Archery and ranged are incredibly with in AoW: Shadow Magic. The problem is the added distance and height penalties, and even disregarding those the base chance to hit usually never goes above 65%. In the original, there were no penalties for distance and height, just a straight attack vs. defense roll - you just had to watch out for obstructions.

While archers are incredibly useful at defending walled garrisons, they are of limited use offensively and largely deadweight against walled garrisons. They're just too inaccurate to do serious damage. General rule of thumb is that any standard archery or archery-similar unit (4 damage x 3 bolts, low accuracy) that doesn't have at least 1 level of marksmanship at its base level ranges from mediocre in the beginning game to utterly ineffective in the endgame when ultimate units start being deployed. Usually I only use cavalry archers such as centaurs, chariot archers, and nomad archers.

OK, enough gripes about underpowered/bad units. time for the good and useful ones. Flyers are awesome. They ignore walls, move as fast as cavalry, and are usually top-level units with a good survival rate. I actually most prefer using factions with flyers as their ultimate unit (nomads, draconians, elves, humans, and syrons). Marauding red dragon swarms with built-in regeneration are a nightmare to fight against. Air Galleys are the same solid unit from the original that hard-counters half the game, and syron forceships are a great addition because they remove what would otherwise be a monopoly on flying ranged units.

Forget about the traditional war doctrine that "you can't win a war or take over a city with airstrikes alone". In AoW (and particularly Shadow Magic), air power is what wins wars. Leave your ground melee and archers at home when you're attacking a city, swarm it with flyers. Nothing says "all your base are belong to us" like 3 full squads of rocs and dragons with a few air galleys and forceships thrown in. A single air galley/forceship will take over melee-only garrisons single-handed. I would actually consider this a flaw/bad design because a well-designed combat-oriented strategy game should reward intelligent use of combined arms (mixing infantry, cavalry, heavies, and air power - something that StarCraft does every well) instead of rewarding people who deploy a legion of the same unit.

Something else to add regarding taking over walled garrisons: Wall Climbing is a good alternative to flyers if needed.

Anyone else think ranged and slow melee needs a buff?
------------------
The main character/champion system was arguably better designed in the original. Make your own custom character even in the campaign, and then you can add extras throughout.

AoW: Shadow Magic has some weird and questionable design regarding your main character. Your main character doesn't have a mount and walks with 32 base movement points, which slows you down if you want to focus on cavalry and flyers. Even worse, your main character never levels up. Meanwhile, extra champions that join you have limited casting ability, however they have mounts and have 40 base movement.

I also found the domain system annoying, I much prefer how the original allowed champions that join you to get the highest level of casting if you prefer to have several master wizards and the lack of domain limits - cast anywhere in range. Simple and intuitive.

Finally, the original AoW also gave more latitude in picking multiple elemental spheres. The maximum level was 4, which means you can max out 1 element and almost max out another. AoW: Shadow Magic makes the maximum level 6, and then limits you to level 4 if you go with cosmic specialization (no specific element), which locks you out of the best abilities.

[Chimaera]

I agree and disagree.

Distance and height do give penalties to ranged units but they also gives bonuses. Archers firing from inside the castle walls have better chance of hitting enemies because they have a height advantage. A crossbowman or ballista for example could reach up to a 95 chance of hitting the enemy (this usually happens actually).

Enemies do get stuck behind the entrance, yes, but that is more reason to bring siege equipment so as to break down walls as well, or even spread your force to attack from different directions and break down all the doors, or perhaps making sure to have some anti-wall units (units with wall crushing or wall climbing or pass wall). In other situations, if the gate is broken killing the unit may lead to the whole flood of melee units coming in thus reversing the situation entirely. (Some people apparently go in with a small army to use a mass battlefield that can destroy buildings, destroy the buildings then run away, leaving me to have to rebuild my baracks or siege workshop).

I agree on most of the things you said about the flying units and believe they are rather balanced. Most flying units have a relatively low defense in comparison to attack so that they are slightly easier to be shot down, but also harder to defend against, especially with little or no ranged units.

Personally I like the Wizard mechanic over the champion from the original. The fact that I could not cast my spells were I needed them to be cast was more challenging but this one is more interesting. The wizard has no levels because he is more of a point of origin to your spells than an actual military asset and once a wizard tower is built your heroes become more or less channels for him to use spells farther from his/her domain. ( If you are accustomed to the game of chess your wizard is more like the king, a rather useless and the most important piece at the same time, only that in this game this "king" has more uses.) I dare say the only reason the wizard even has an inventory is for last resort cases or defenses against your city (with the right equipment the wizard can become as strong as a cannon even without spells, allowing you to potentially either conserve casting points for some other spell, or defend against a surprise attack if you have already used your casting points.
Also I believe one of the reasons why the wizard was not given the right to level up was because of how overpowered he could potentially become (some of my heroes became near invincible after leveling and equipping them, so much more when every spell the wizard casts that kills units technically counts as a kill to them. Think of a mass battlefield spell against a big army: two or three levels almost instantly.)

Lastly, I agree to some extent about the elemental spheres. Though choosing different spheres may leave the opponent to guess about your potential spells on hand, while also giving you greater diversity, it becomes rather useless if the game is dragged on for a longer time than expected. I would have preffered instead that a mix of elemental spheres would give spells specific to that mix (so if you had death, earth, and water you could research some form of blight creature or the like).

Over all, a find this entire discussion to be very deep. Thank you for reading!

[Dunadd]

Certainly field armies can't advance fast if they have a lot of ranged troops or infantry with them.

As for assaults on forts and walled cities, it makes perfect sense that gates are bottlenecks, so you use spells, or flyers, o5r units with wall climbing or phase, or else you attack more than one gate at the same time, and have archers or artillery ready to move up behind your attacking units and shoot the defender in the gateway once the gate's down.