Balance feedback:
I am giving this feedback after completing the campaign on insane. As a number of other posters have also said, the challenge and AI is lacking here.
1. Many of us who finished the campaign on higher difficulties did so without ever raising the threat pass level 1. Meaning the Sorcerer King never took a hostile action towards us, until we killed off both of his lieutenants, but then it was game over for the SK next turn. I never had a SK unit attack my cities, or a shard controlled by one of my outposts. I don't even know if SK units can attack shards and outposts...
2. Doomsday counter. Again many of us finished insane with a 0 doomsday counter. The SK was still calling me his "friend" even after I killed his first lieutenant.
I realize the Doomsday counter was probably watered down under protests against a perceived turn limit. It's existence, however, is the primary source of challenge in the game. Without it the player has as long as he pleases to build up before challenging the SK; no one else is seizing territory, acquiring treasure, leveling units, or building up armies to the point of unstopability -- just the player. If that isn't timed, there's no challenge. So either someone
else needs to amass a threatening amount of power or the timer needs to actually become a factor.
The SK needs to be much more demanding, such as demanding you advance the doom counter by greater and greater amounts in exchange for his "gifts." Persuasion-point options shouldn't negate this, it should just talk him down to be a bit less demanding. The SK making demands shouldn't be pure dice rolls, he should be more likely to the point of certainty in making a demand if a certain time has gone by (this may help normalize players who reload more often from generating different levels of threat).
3. Scaling of enemies.
Take the level 24 elite bandit horsemen, if you mouse over their stats, they only have one stat that scales with level: hp. There's no bonus to its damage on insane. The same for trolls, they are stuck at 20 damage -- which means they are very non-threatening no matter how level buffed they get. Making units threatening is going to be hard to balance with spells like hypnosis, tame, etc, because the stronger you make them, the stronger you make the player if he charms them. So while I would like to see scaling to make these units more interesting, there needs to be bonuses that only the AI gets like the HP multiplier on insane.
4. That spell that Reduces Doomsday
Never used it; didn't need to -- but it's still way too OP. By late game, one turn of mana can easily be over 100, and reducing the clock by 15 points is very cheap. Even by mid game, where you may have about 10 shards, you are basically looking at just two turns of mana income to reduce 15 turns of doom clock advancement. The cost needs to rise by about 5 fold, maybe more, in higher difficulties. You might think of making the cost of the spell increase with the turn count, or each cast.
5. Step Into the light
Best named spell in the game. Way too OP though. Especially once you get 20 shards for instance, and are fighting say 5 battles a turn with your armies. That's 100 free mana per turn! That's enough to lower the doom clock every turn -- not that I needed to do that. And I'm explaining a casual use scenario. If you wanted to you could use it twice per battle, or really milk it and send some armored units against low lvl enemies, and walk away with 100 mana from a single battle. In short, it makes mana limitless. And even though I gave a late game scenario, you can start abusing it early and mid game with great effect as well.
6. Cooldown / mana-free healing.
I'm not a fan of cleric/warlock/whisp healing mechanics because I know that even if the Sorcerer King sends all 72 armies at once he's hoarding in the NE corner of the map, I can beat them with a single army. My units won't ever run out of healing, because the wisp/clerics can always heal my guys back to full basically mana free at the end of the fight. The SK can never wear my guys down as long as I have free unlimited healing, and with the exception of the (low cost) summoned wisp it's all mana free. There's also free-to-cast healing spells like restore, and the heal spell itself can be spammed even mid game, at only 6 cost, if need be. Each battle, the sovereign can cast all his spells again, so the sovereign can keep supporting his army with free or nearly free spells to heal them up. When you exploit Step into the light at the same time, you are actually making lots of mana.
If you are looking for easy solutions, one might be giving the SK his own set of strategic spells, like a curse of mortality which causes the mana cost of players healing spells to gradually increase with the turn or doom count -- causing even those early game cheap mana free heals to have a non-trivial mana cost later in game.
7. Cloud Walk
The spell is too OP as it cheaply allows you to place an entire army almost anywhere on the explored map at 10 mana cost, when you might be generating 100-200 mana per turn. I think it either needs a cooldown period, or about 15x times cost increase, as it lets the player effortlessly undo errors of unguarded towns or battlefronts fronts, or ending a units turn next to a dangerous enemy.
