Rune Mages: So ridiculous...
 

Okay, so clearly the Rune Mage was one of the last units worked on in the game. Right before release no doubt, since I dare say a developer temporarily increased their init to 20 for testing purposes (so they could always use them at the start of each fight!)

That aside, here's the setup:

Rune Mage has the Phantom skill. It makes a duplicate stack of one of your existing ones, but with only a percent of the total size. It can get up to 60% of the original size with 40 Mind runes laying about in your inventory.

Point Number 1: The number of Rune mages you have doesn't change this. A single Rune mage can make a 60 Royal Griffon phantoms from a stack of 100. You could go into a fight with 4 split stacks of Rune Mages, and a single stack of griffons, and by the end of the turn have 4 phantom griffon stacks, and 5 Celestial Guard stacks!

Point Number 2: Jarls and Paladins can give another turn to a stack, even if it has larger leadership (though not arbitrarily large). Somewhere around 34% efficiency on Phantom, you can phantom out a stack of paladins large enough to give the Rune Mage stack another turn.

Point Number 3: With level 3 in Rune Magic, your Rune Mages start with 2 Defense runes. A Mage can cast Runic Word twice on them in the first turn to give them 4 more, for a total of 6. You can then phantom jarls or paladins, have them give the Rune Mage another turn, and repeat until you've used them all up. All on the first turn. That's right, you could phantom 6 times (7 with wanderer scroll) on a single turn! Those 7 stacks could each be 60% of a single stack, giving you 430% of a single stacks worth of troops! That's almost a full extra army of guys!

Point Number 3: Sadly the Runic Word ability on the Rune Mages is broken. It does not give you more runes when you have more Magic Runes. Otherwise it would be even more ridiculous.

Okay, could you also describe for me how UNIT runes affect Rune Mages? 'Cause for us who have never encountered the unit in the game yet, this is not so clear... back in CW Rune Mages used Might/Mind/Magic runes (an inherently flawed setup I never liked, given the rarity of runes in the game) to increase their skills. Now, they use the Attack/defense/luck runes? Or what?

Okay, haven't got them yet, but they sound ridiculously overpowered. Phantom is a very powerful spell, and a 20%-60% phantom ability on a unit would be useful even if it had only one charge... repeatability, interaction with paladins and independence of the size of the rune mages stack make it silly. For now, one can abstain from using them, I suppose, but hopefully they will be fixed (and balanced) soon.


@BB Shockwave: I'll probably be ninja'd, but anyway: I read that their abilities use up the unit runes on activation (3 different abilities for attack, defense and luck runes), and are more powerful if you have unused talent runes (same as with rune mages in AP).

I don't think the change from ability cooldowns to Rune limitations was well thought out. And switching from giving you a random enemy to phantoming one of your own units seems pretty powerful. You can be guarunteeded of liking one of your units, where what unit you'd get from the enemy was much less likely to be optimal.

Hopefully they do something to balance the unit, as it does seem exceptionally OP, even if you don't actively exploit it.

They should fix Royal Griffons too, a phantom stack of Royal Griffons should not be able to leave behind persistent stack of Celestial Guards, the Guards should share their hosts phantom turn timer and expire at the same time.

Yeah it's pretty silly, their dmg from destruction is insane aswell. Arlania seems pretty boring becouse of how powerfull combo you can pull of in here.

After you get Rune Mage and Royal Griffin.
This game quite become "Clone war"!
Royal G give 1 phantom
Rune Mage can give 2. (maybe more as stated above)
Soothsayer can make 1 more from enemy.
This is just too much! If you play mage, get some from Summon spell. Well it's just too much !

I noticed that no additional runes were granted at 30+ Magic Runes, but at 40+ Runes I was getting 4 (so an additional 2). You're pretty much guaranteed at least 1 Defence Rune per Runic Word use, so each Runic Mage can cast phantom at least every other turn.

4 Runic Mage stacks + Anything pretty much rolls over everything ...

I agree that runemage is too powerfull with phantom. I have nerfed it in my minimod, but i don't stop splitting runemage abuse. May be by setting leadership requirement ?

@Zechnofobe It doesnt work this way my friend : units play in order or initiative, so first play runemage then paladin OR jarl give them second wind and so on to lowest initiative unit, then second turns go in reverse order, from lower to high initiative so runemage will play last in that turn with second wind from pala/jarl. It`s still to much to 1 units cast 60% phantom of whole stack but it cant act more then 2 times/turn (only goblin is able to do that :-) I`m not sure if things changed in WotN but in AP/CW it worked this way, order of units is decided on initiative from high to low, then in reverse and then turn ended, next turn same . . .

As for fixing their basic initiative go to game folder/data/data.kfs and find runemage.atom open it set initiative from 20 to any value you think appropriate (i chose 25 :-P ) close file save it in data.kfs and try game, new init value will be implemented right away in game.