That said, my favourite anti-rogue strategy is to squash them before the AI starts spamming shadow stalkers. Theocrat's Shrines of Smiting can do a number on them. Some classes are much better at dealing with them than Warlord, too. What also really helps is having units with some source of elemental damage, such as Phalanxes with the Pillar of the Stylites upgrade (needs DLC) or Draconian warlord units. A difficulty is that you need to maintain a neutral alignment if you want to make good use of that spell.) (A spell introduced by Eternal Lords that massively reduces physical resistance on all units of a given type. Some strategies that work include Hellfire (fire mastery spell that hits everything on the battlefield with massive fire damage, your side included) and Cardinal Culling. They have no hard counters, and are pretty good at dealing with soft ones. That said, I do actually agree that Shadow Stalkers are one of the strongest spammable end-game units. If you don't have your very best units yet at that point, it probably means you're losing. Yeah, once Dark Pact comes into play and all rogue units get extra abilities (like that teleport for shadow stalkers) you really have to be at the top of your game. If they did, everyone would be playing rogue, and thats clearly not the case. But they do not break the game balance at all. Shadow stalkers are certainly an awesome unit. Balancing among so many class/race combinations (not to mention vs different map/start settings) is hard to do, but the devs spent a lot of time on that and its about as good as any game I have ever seen, given that its a near impossible task anyway. I dont remember which class was (slightly) leading, but I am pretty sure it was not rogue.īalancing is not off in this game at all. Somewhere there is a site, run by I think Hilliadan, that has actually kept track of these stats.

So when you say 'balancing is so off', you really have to compare rogues as a class vs all the other classes, and this is best done by seeing how the best players fare against each other using the various classes.

Rogues, apart from every other class, dont get a T4, so the stalker is its high end unit. So the rogue T4 must be really awesome, right? Nope. Ok you are new, so first of all rogues wont be getting owned by shadow stalkers anytime soon, since the shadow stalker is a rogue summon.

Age of wonders 3 rogue strategy