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Without it, melee based armies with little to no range based units (Vampires, Chaos Warriors, even Lizardmen) would have absolutely no way to fight, let alone beat the type of army you're building.
The fix is rather simple, add a single hero to the army and call it a day
Therefore It is not balance, it is nonsense.
It makes perfect sense why the game grounds you. Like the above poster said. It is balanced and totally fair. Your strategy is nonsense. 😅
Greetings
And then hide him in the woods somewhere where he won't be found.
The problem here is that this is clearly too advanced a strategy for OP to implement. He can only control units that have no chance of getting attacked or needing evasion. 😅
Anything is easier than "completely impossible" so yes, it will make the fight easier for melee based factions.
(lol and i don't know how to mix this up because they yell their name each time you click on them)
2. It is possible to land with your flying lord / hero, though generally you can keep one hero on foot / horse and keep him hiding in a corner. Waywatcher is good at this due to perma stealth, better to also have the mage for backup in case you need to retreat the WW (e.g. then land the mage on the other side of the map)
3. Always forge the item set with the Archer summon first (Dreaming Set iirc?), this gives another permanent ground unit which also has stealth at T2/3 and can cause even more confusion for the AI
Sure you've "won" the lord cannot do anything. But the enemy trolls and keeps running. I've had my fair share of such players in Guild wars 1. Fully specced into running around to just troll you and waste your time.
Should it matter in SP? Not really.
But it's a morale penalty. If you can get unbreakable unit's you can fly around to your hearts content without losing the battle.
Thinking of classic games with brutal air cheese (Warcraft III, AOW Planetfall), there's usually some very effective counters to air units for everyone. People just don't often expect to get rushed with air units they can't defend against.
Though the fully buffed Hawk Riders are so godly, like one volley can outright delete units across the map, and with all upgrades they seem to win practically every melee if needed
Most flying units that have ranged attacks are terrible in melee and would easily be beaten by pretty much anything that could actually reach them. Meaning most armies have at least something that could wreck them.
Even if they didn't, flying archers have low unit counts and don't tend to do a whole lot of damage compared with ground archers/gun units so in a straight out fight they'd usually lose or be heavily damaged by anything with a ranged attack without heavy micro.
Final point, the AI will never build that stack, just never will happen so there's no point to saying "this or that faction won't be able to fight them" because that's never going to really be a concern and lets face it 90% of the time you can field something the AI just flat can't deal with.
Between one man doom stacks, hero stacks, magic, army abilities, ect there really isn't much point to going "well the AI has trouble with it so it needs a nerf" the AI has trouble with darn near everything because it just flat isn't very capable and if we wanted to address everything the player could do to break the game we'd end up removing bloody half of it. I don't see much point in trying to forcibly balance a flying army with a stupid gimmick because "its not balanced against the AI" when there are so many things that totally break the AI.
1. Hawk Riders are not weak in melee, they get a couple of extra buffs from the Sisters and tech, and same like some other multi-model air units (e.g. Malagor's Harpies) have a huge advantage because they automatically cause the "attacked in rear" effect on their ground targets. Haven't found any single entity target yet they couldn't kill.
Though they are specifically great in melee against other air targets. Really make sure to send your Riders into melee whenever it looks alright, you can deal a ton of damage and just fly away
2. Hawk Riders don't have a low model count, in fact your team of 16-18 Riders can cover the entire width of some of the standard maps (iirc they are the unit taking up the most space)
3. You can actually fly on top of ranged units, which forces them to turn around or reposition (pretty heavy abuse possible, with Gyrocopters this is mandatory)
4. TBH when it comes to doomstacks, the Hawk Riders with the volley are some of the hardest ones. Don't know of anything less than Ikit's Doomrockets which can outright delete several units regardless of distance (and this doesn't even start on cooldown).
You even get 2 charges from a later LL upgrade...
Hawk riders with the sisters only get like 10 extra melee attack, 10% resistance, and 10% more ammo (outside of the normal red line buffs) that's hardly a huge bonus.
Sure they have 40 melee attack which is decent but they only have 24 melee defense. Those are not great stats, and off the back of that they have low HP. 3400 vs a basic archer unit's 4100 and a basic eternal guard's 5400. I have no idea what you're on that you think 18 units isn't a low unit count when most troops have at least 75 or 60. It's also worth noting that while they have armor piercing melee attacks they don't have armor piercing missiles.
Couple that with their terrible 15 armor and yeah they are not great melee fighters unless you land multiple units of them on a single enemy and if that's the case that doesn't make them good fighters that just means you're bullying single units. You can do that with pretty much anything that can fly. Sending them against a single entity they do alright since it's large enough they can hit it easily and still avoid most of the attacks but against actual melee troops they won't have a great time unless they have a serious numbers advantage.
Also yeah sure you can micro one unit of hawk riders to keep the AI from shooting them but what happens when you have 18 units of them? You're getting shot full stop, someone is going to bet getting shots off. At that point you're far better served to just VoK the enemy ranged units.
As far as better doomstacks, seriously? Uh yeah there are a lot of better doomstacks. Sure you can't delete something from a distance quite as well, but VoK in WH3 isn't the instant death it was in WH2 it's not nearly as strong as it was and in WH3 you only have 2 shots max instead of 3.
Necrofex, Vampire hero spam, properly teched out aspiring champions, stegadons, I could keep going but any of those groups will outright delete an enemy army with minimal effort. Even something like a shade stack with a general with a good name of power will probably be able to handle more enemies.
That isn't to say hawkriders are bad, they aren't bad, they just can't stand up to the kind of punishment other doomstacks can. This is really noticeable if you have to fight 2-3 full armies at the same time. They will absolutely not handle 3 full stacks, even 2 full stacks is iffy as they flat just don't have the ammo and once you're stuck in melee its a bad time unless you want the battle to take forever and be a nightmare to play through.
It makes it at least doable
I guess you havent played that lizard guy with all the flying units. His faction has easy access to stealth skinks. The AI has even more trouble with that.
There's a lot of cheeses you can use in campaign that people get used to that fail to work if you play vs people.