Caster of Magic II Game balance brainstorming.

[Seravy]

Looking at a turn ~150 save, the AI cities have garrisons with a few halberdiers, some low tier summons (spiders, ghouls), and some swordsmen or occasionally magicians. There are some good units here and there like an occasional 2-3 Nightmares or Doom Drakes but most cities aren't old enough yet for those.
Merlin just started getting Stone Giants which explains why he was less affected as he managed to get a rare creature into many of the cities in time.
Rjak on the other hand only has ghouls.

Looking at this realistically, getting the first rare summons at this time is reasonable for this level of difficulty. So Merlin is okay. Rampaging stacks being 1 rare and several uncommons at the time players get their first rares might be excessive, although these rares aren't supported by a wizard. It's as easy to deal with the as dropping 5-6 Fire Bolts on it or having 3-4 magicians in the garrison.

Rjak plays Trolls. I guess Trolls really underperform for the AI. They had bad growth, bad production, bad magic power, and regeneration is not relevant for AI strategies. What's worse, they can't attack flying so the advantage in lair hunting is gone as well.

Oh and meanwhile Ariel seems to be stuck on their starting island. Only 4 cities... she has no ships or ship buildings on turn 90, I suspect a bug. She isn't at war so she couldn't have lost them that way.

[Seravy]

Looks like Rjak was performing poorly for the same reason Ariel was stuck - not building ships early enough despite starting continent being only enough for 3-4 cities.
Using the same file he is doing ok now.

[zitro1987]

Part of me thinks heroes are far too dependent on common-tier Life magic to be strong and wonder if making holy weaponn and holy armor have half effect on heroes and heroes having slightly higher starting attack points and armor points balance things out a tad to make them usable in more games.

I notice how non-magic heroes tend to underperform in most situations

[MrBiscuits]

On small and tiny maps often there are no neutral cities at all. Can some be added (with extra land especially for them if needed) ?

Also it might be good to increase the number of neutral cities on I am the Boss on your plane and the opposite plane for Race to the Unknown.

Can neutrals gradually develop if left a long time? I quite like the idea of finding highly developed cities that are hard to conquer on Race to the Unknown when you cross to the other plane.
An increase in rampaging monsters there would also help give the feeling of settling and conquering a hostile environment.

[Seravy]

Overriding land amount to place neutral cities defeats the purpose of playing on tiny land.
Yes, they can build new buildings and units slowly but their population growth is limited.

[MrBiscuits]

Overriding land amount to place neutral cities defeats the purpose of playing on tiny land.
Yes, they can build new buildings and units slowly but their population growth is limited.

Playing on tiny is used to have faster games as you don't have to move your units around so much. A small amount of extra land around a neutral city doesn't slow things down much.

Call of the Wild seems a bit useless, it just creates stacks of 3-4 units that enemy wizards deal with easily. Also if they are death wizards they just get a load of free undead creatures.
Also it seems a bit unintuitive that nodes you own don't create any stacks, so as you get more powerful the spell becomes even less use.
I'd say make the stacks larger and gradually more powerful as time goes on. Also your nodes should have double the chance of creating a stack rather than none.

The new abundance spell doesn't work well with Gaia's blessing or other nature spells like change terrain or nature omniscient. Before it helped create very large cities which was part of the attraction of nature. 
Now if you have Gaia's blessing with it then abundance gradually becomes less useful as the city converts to grassland tiles.

[Seravy]

I'd say make the stacks larger and gradually more powerful as time goes on.

It already does that though. It uses the same turn count scaled monster budget as rampaging monsters.

Your own nodes don't create stacks because usually your nodes are in your own territory and monsters would have no target to attack.

Now if you have Gaia's blessing with it then abundance gradually becomes less useful as the city converts to grassland tiles.

Convert the tiles to Forest instead for the extra production bonus from Gaia' Blessing and then you can still benefit from Abundance as well.

[massone]

Call of the Wild seems a bit useless, it just creates stacks of 3-4 units that enemy wizards deal with easily. Also if they are death wizards they just get a load of free undead creatures.
Also it seems a bit unintuitive that nodes you own don't create any stacks, so as you get more powerful the spell becomes even less use.
I'd say make the stacks larger and gradually more powerful as time goes on. Also your nodes should have double the chance of creating a stack rather than none.

It's pretty powerful and annoying on higher difficulties with 13 wizards, where rampaging monsters are a big threat and Call of the Wild makes them much harder to deal with. On Master+, the rampaging monsters will typical include the highest tier of summons around the same time that everyone is just starting to research them (or earlier, in the case of Chaos Spawns and Air Elementals; these appear during mid-late Uncommon). So when Call of the Wild is cast, nobody has the garrisons to effectively defend against multiple waves of stacks with Rares in it without losses.

[Anskiy]

I can confirm that Call of the Wild is secretly quite powerful. Especially if you combine it with other economy curses like Doomsday or Armageddon. It can outright cripple mediocre AIs even on higher difficulties.

[Suppanut]

when chaos global curse coming into play, it is always Call the Wild which act as last straw that broke camel's back as Doomsday and Armaggedon don't destroy city for you. once their garrison deserted, those city would immediately become target for rampaging monsters and left only ruins for you to loots (and could be easily looted by caster of Call the Wild due to Call the Wild make those monster in ruins toothless to caster).