Test games played

[zitro1987]

You have a naturally invisible unit so you can take advantage of that to kill things with combat spells without needing armies. And they provide power for it.

...exchange? Not in addition? That makes the units significantly weaker...doubt even a Fire Bolt can make up for losing 4 shots from 6 figures.

Spearmen could be:
1 ranged, 7 caster, 20 cost (or if lower cost, reduce 1 melee or armor)  - mostly cheap spells like bless, holy armor, resist spells, warp wood/disrupt, even weakness ... I'd ensure cost is 20

Swordsmen could be:
2 ranged, 10-11 caster, 40-45 cost (or if lower cost, reduce 1 melee or armor) - once you have 10-11 caster (and decent ranged attacks), you get a lot more at your disposal, including dispel magic!

Haberdiers could be:
3 ranged, 15 caster, 85 cost - 15 caster is better for a sturdy melee/ranged unit than 20 caster on a fragile magician. This unit can cast all sorts of common spells and work well with focus magic. If too overpowered, reduce ranged down to '2' and lower cost to 70-75.

[Seravy]

The current game made me realize there is a bug in AI research - they are not picking Gargoyles/giant spiders/lycantropy. Basically the rule of "already known common summon, delay researching others" affected these creatures and delayed them which wasn't supposed to happen.

That's actually a fairly huge impact bug, as it means Chaos and Nature wizards were significantly weaker in the early game than they could have been if they did research them early as intended.

[Nelphine]

Blah, hordes of werewolves already come early. If they come a lot earlier, that's going to be ... Difficult.

[Seravy]

...actually that's because Lycanthopy wasn't affected by the bug, only the other two. It only counts as a known weak summon for purposes of picking other summons to research, but it isn't one itself so it's not delayed.
Basically, Gargoyles and Spiders were supposed to come as early as Lycanthropy but did not.

[Arnuz]

Nelphine, I wouldn't want these normal units to be able to cast confusion or black sleep. That'd need a much more expensive unit. For me, 7/10/12 is fine with the magic shots.

Seravy, compared with other races starts mono-chaos dark elves get an AG basically never, at master+, given the lack of resources in the first years. It takes a lot of luck. Having some magic support might help, I'm hoping.

[Seravy]

For Dark Elves, I'm tempted to do :

-remove spearmen (cavalry is probably a better node scout, expensive but reaches faster, and at 5 movement has a good chance to escape)
-swordsmen with caster 7-10, magic ranged unchanged
-halberdiers with caster 10-12, magic ranged unchanged - or 12-15 caster but lower melee.
-new unit requiring a sage's guild with high (20-30) caster, more durable than warlock but less ranged attack. If the race does get the "caster" as racial special, not having one with 20 or higher when everyone else's magicians do that would be odd.

[Seravy]

Continued my game. Lost the two nodes in the middle for a few turns but the spiders I summoned quickly got them back. As both enemies had fire walls on their cities which isn't too spider friendly (not that it matters too much with Resist Elements but I still rather have them come out than me having to go in), I decided to add 4 magicians to my main spider army and already razed 3 cities.

Thanks to lack of Gargoyles on the chaos wizards, I can advance effortlessly - if they did have the gargoyles, I'd need to rely on my units more. (both magicians and pikemen work well enough on them.)

I'm having no trouble due to early summoning and the treasure that got me, but I do need to keep my taxes low and have a really poor income. While the "make up for bad early game with magic" strategy works, it might actually be the only one working for the race, but we'll only know after the next game(s).

[Seravy]

Meanwhile, a summary of my current ideas for High Men, not that I can make any decision based on this current game as the spiders are carrying the thing completely it seems :

-remove Spearmen. If it's meant to be a late race, they can live without that, early scouting is not that relevant and later, using swordsmen is not a big deal. It also means no easy way to get rid of unrest to cancel the race's main drawback (whether that's desired or not is a different story). This can free up a slot for a relevant unit. 
-Instead of spearmen, add a new unit : Crusader. Melee unit, stats like Halberdier on other races, but has Healing Spell, requires Fighter's Guild and Shrine. (encourages building religious buildings even more)
Main purpose is to provide a unit that can fight well and isn't as expensive (and buff/level reliant) as pikemen, secondary is to encourage building a shrine (which reduces the high unrest).
-Replace Cavalry with Knight : higher armor and maybe an extra sword, but more expensive. A medium tier cavalry unit that doesn't have all the "extras" nor the stats of Paladins, but fights decently and doesn't need a fighter's guild so it can fill the large gap between the early but useless units and the good ones. I actually don't think we have such medium tier cavalry units in the game at all, we only have bottom and top tier ones.
-Add "builds buildings X% cheaper". Helps with the unrest problem (faster religious buildings and easier to build a new city if razing other races) as well as the "too slow" problem.

Speaking of cavalry...they actually come fairly early and aren't that bad...anyone tried relying on those (and/or bowmen) to survive the early game?

[zitro1987]

Meanwhile, a summary of my current ideas for High Men, not that I can make any decision based on this current game as the spiders are carrying the thing completely it seems :

-remove Spearmen. If it's meant to be a late race, they can live without that, early scouting is not that relevant and later, using swordsmen is not a big deal. It also means no easy way to get rid of unrest to cancel the race's main drawback (whether that's desired or not is a different story). This can free up a slot for a relevant unit. 
-Instead of spearmen, add a new unit : Crusader. Melee unit, stats like Halberdier on other races, but has Healing Spell, requires Fighter's Guild and Shrine. (encourages building religious buildings even more)
Main purpose is to provide a unit that can fight well and isn't as expensive (and buff/level reliant) as pikemen, secondary is to encourage building a shrine (which reduces the high unrest).
-Replace Cavalry with Knight : higher armor and maybe an extra sword, but more expensive. A medium tier cavalry unit that doesn't have all the "extras" nor the stats of Paladins, but fights decently and doesn't need a fighter's guild so it can fill the large gap between the early but useless units and the good ones. I actually don't think we have such medium tier cavalry units in the game at all, we only have bottom and top tier ones.
-Add "builds buildings X% cheaper". Helps with the unrest problem (faster religious buildings and easier to build a new city if razing other races) as well as the "too slow" problem.

Speaking of cavalry...they actually come fairly early and aren't that bad...anyone tried relying on those (and/or bowmen) to survive the early game?

*Remove high men spearmen - fine by me
*Crusader - I was thinking of paladins having the healing, but this would be a better idea for earlier in the game. I'd give it 1 more melee than the base halberdier and maybe move 3, but for a cost closer to 100. No 'healer' (that's what priests are for)
*Knight - I like this idea - Requires 'barracks' and 'stables'? +20 cost but +2 armor? A mobile tank unit that doesn't hit as hard as crusader.
*The builder race trait would be great.

[Seravy]

Meanwhile another idea : Instead of Crusader and Knight separately, have just Crusader, but make it into what I described as Knight, without removing the original Cavalry, but it requiring an additional building and having Healing. (either Cathedral, or Shrine, or Parthenon, or Fighter's Guild - probably best to have the Shrine.)

...or we can have it without the healer if we want to encourage the use of priests, in that case it might be a good idea to require the Parthenon instead of the Shrine.