Shadow Walkers is pretty useless.

[Make clash permanent]

Its the society trait which seems to only boost early game vision on scounts and cities basically.

Hope they buff that soon because the name sounds awesome.

[CrUsHeR]

It gives you one extra scout at game start, which is around 4 turns build time on a standard empire.

It also makes your scouts permanently invisible, and gives a free permanent wayfinder enchantment. This saves a pretty huge amount of mana if you're going to scout a lot.

And it has some extra utility, example you can excavate the underground without having to run away every time you uncover a roaming army.

[Anarchy Burger]

People undervalue scouting in these games. You are getting situational awareness sooner, intel on enemies, more free pick ups than enemies, etc

[Stormwind]

I was in a 4 player FFA, and no one had more information than I did because of shadow walkers. I had stealth scouts at every city, and 2 on the city I was attacking. It was awesome.

Cool game, 2 people can have wildly different views of a trait like this.

[Midas]

It's good with dark culture for spying on enemy territory ahead of your armies.

[Anarchy Burger]

Scouts can pillage right? Thatd be fun to harass with invisible scouts

[CrUsHeR]

Well it's not THAT universally perfect, as the AI loves to take the True Sight perk on heroes, and quite a few units have it too. Also, city upgrades with true sight and +vision range.

But yeah generally being able to hide in plain sight is very useful. Intelligence about your enemies' cities and armies is invaluable.

[Make clash permanent]

Oh for sure in Pvp. But with the vanilla AI there doesn't seem to be a point. Thinking about installing the aggressiveness mod.

Right now it feels like simcity with the occasional romp towards unlosable battles.

[Gaslov]

Couples very well with the Industrious culture. Get that prospect going and in relative safety.

[Balekai]

You can also use them as Summon spotters. Get behind enemy lines and park an invisible scout there. Then start plopping down summon stacks to attack and raid.

[WalkingMeat]

I personally like Shadow walkers a lot, but I have to agree it is a lot more situational compared to stuff like mana addicts, prolific swarmers or adapt settlers.
It definitely has its time and place to shine, but free pickups are a lot more scarce compared to Age of Wonders 3 and there are enough sources of true sight by the midgame.
The culture trait itself is completely fine, I just feel like the emphasis in this iteration of the series is favouring other aspects of the game more, compared to its predecessor.

[Baron]

It doesn't have benefits with hard numbers, sure. But - in addition to the other uses mentioned in this thread - you can also put it on Barbarian scouts to let them get outposts down risk free.

Ironically for a Shadow ability, it's least useful to Dark, of all factions. Their scouts already have stealth on Forest, Rock and Swamp terrain.

[Ghost from warp]

Invisible fast scouts is actually huge, i cant see any issues with this one. They are not only scouts, they can also penetrate enemy lines and start pillaging crucial structures freely unless player build true sight tower which is quite far in tech tree and you have this scouts from the beginning. Pilaging Jammer in precise moment is a question of victory or defeat.