Thank you for some amazing work; you put a lot of development into this and i look forward to playing it.

I just loaded the current version as of Jan 11, and started testing the Death Sphere

It appears many of the spells require undead to take advantage of the setup. However, I did not start out with any undeath units and I did not have have any undead city properties

Perhaps this is still in development? thanks

I was hoping the undead summons and ability to reanimate ruins as ghouled cities would be enough to make the undead spells worthwhile. I've been debating adding a ghouled city start, ghouled unit start, or Arch Lich as a hero upgrade to increase the number of undead units you have access to.

I tried to keep Death Wizards away from being forced to use Ghouled units so I don't think there are too many spells that require undead to take full advantage of them. The only strategic ones should be Death Mastery, Damnation (not sure if it affects your living units), Undead Plague, and maybe another that I'm missing. Tactical should only be Desecration.

I'll check to see if there are other spells that are filtering by undead unintentionally. I'm planning on continuing balance and refinement work once I get through all spheres for the first time.

Thanks for the follow-up. I have played undead as well as "stand alone" undead leaders in many AOE games, and managing undead without undead healers (via leader and/or support units) is difficult. I have not x2 checked the spell list - you might be right on the spells you called out, but I believe the Death Wizard will be held back; did you get a chance to playtest that one yet?

I am currently testing your Fire Wizard, and it plays quite well, as well as blending in nicely with other unit mods. Looking forward to your next release.

Thanks for the feedback.

I haven't gotten a chance to completely finish a play test of the Death Wizard yet. I started one game, and it's off to a rough start since I forgot how weak I made the Wizards in combat :P. Not in the void yet, but a too many close calls. I might give the wizards their ranged attack for free so that they can level up a bit faster, but that might let them level too quickly.

I haven't played far enough to figure out whether the undead become too much of a pain, but I think they are going to be less problematic than it seems. Mend Magical Being will work on most of the undead that you can easily get at the beginning since they are mostly summons. The only problems are Ghouled units from Animate Ruins and Ghoul Curse heroes. If it still becomes a problem, I'll figure out some unit to give heal undead.

Sounds good
I have no problem with the Fire Wizard at the 1 step below hardest setting, but I did start with a bulked up army setting. Wizard can't handle melee but the spells and summons more than make up for that.

Dr_K: I did a full test against 3 AI Kings using the Death Wizard. The base Wizard is so good, I was able to win, however the death spells / summons were more difficult to leverage. I did plunder and raise some cities as undead to get the healing, which helped. However, that was a mixed result. Without healers, I kept having to send the production and undead summons back to those cities. Main advantage of undead cities is the great special undead units to build that are not available here when you raise class is not undead. The undead untils here that can be Wizard summoned are nice, but this dynamic is a challenge.

My recommendation -- consider making the Death Wizard work as a variation of the undead class - so you start off building undead cities. Perhaps natively too powerful, so, dial down specs where availabile.

Let me know you think.

Great work!
Thanks

Thanks again swalk.

I did finish my play test of the Death Wizard and I definitely agree that there needs to be more access to undead units. I'm probably going to try to start with a ghouled city and give the option of ghouling or migrating cities, but I'm not sure what kind of combinations are possible yet. To compensate for the lack of regen, I'll probably add a passive heal to supports somewhere in the tech tree.

Also, when you say "the base Wizard is so good", are you referring to the skills you can research or the Wizard hero unit? I figured the class was on the overpowered side balance and was going to have to nerf some things. Was there anything specifically that seemed to make the class (or hero) overpowered?

Things that I thought might be OP from the start were the Constructor and Merchant upgrades. Also the stacking of Adv. Logistics with Explorer gives your units way too many movement points.

Yes, by base wizard I mean all the spells that come with any Wizard, as in your list. If one plays an outproduce the enemy game, like I tend to, properly managed those spells are pretty powerful. Too powerful - I would need to double check what are the tradeoffs.