[namad]

actually this is where you're incorrect.


droids can revive an infinitely large number of droids, and via sacrifice create a quite large amount of non-droid revives as well, however eventually you'll run out of mana, unless maybe you're enemy has a stack of non-retaliation units you can set up an infinite mana combo via mana spring with.

in balance for this the droids are otherwise fairly mediocre units without a lot else going for them.



rune mages: can in tandem with another unit generate an infinite number of revives of ANYTHING that can ever be revived by it's tandem partners. although the revival of non-droids as you pointed out is far far slower! however you don't have to cast sacrifice constantly, and so you don't have to spend mana, or rely on managing to proc magic spring repeatedly (which you cannot always do)

that's only one of the rune mages abilities though, the other two abilities are also bonkers! the laser is basically as powerful as any offensive ability any unit has, comparing to the droids which have quite poor offense. then the final ability generates infinite uses of the other two abilities, but if you have 40magic runes (or possibly fewer magic runes in the latest steam patch) it can also generate runes fast enough for quite a lot of casts of the spell chargers which can generate endless mana and endless rage!


the fact that the rune mage requires a tandem isn't really a drawback compared to droids because droids have to work in tandem as well. where the rune mage really shines though is in the things like phantom'ing royal thorns or royal griffins, or ANYTHING, that's the biggest drawback of droids, they can't use their stupidly OP healing until AFTER SOMETHING DIES, whereas the rune mage's ability can be used to heal things after things die, OR simply to increase the size of the army on turn 1 before anything has died, it can PREHEAL! and it can do it every turn instead of every 3 turns, so while the healing power is lower, you can use it more times per battle and on more targets....


the final point though is that you could just run BOTH and go rune mage:droid:droid:inquistor/or/paladin:royal thorn/or/royal griffin


now if it were possibly to run 5types of droids all at once, OR to run two stacks of the same type of unit at full leadership (the way enemies can) then yeah an all droid army would be stronger than an army with rune mages... but since you have to run 3non-droids in every army, and the droids can only heal those units via sacrifice, and sacrifice is very expensive it starts to limit the power of the absurdly powerful healing the repair droids have. also you can run a rune mage in a stack of 1, you could let's say run this army: royal griffins:rune mage:rune mage:rune mage:rune mage and after the first turn have 340% of your leadership in griffins all of whom have created celestial guardians and then the following turn have 580% of your leadership in celestial guardians and royal griffins ...


repair droids are a powerful option that's not that poorly balanced, magic spring might be unbalanced but at least it's unbalanced in a way that takes forever and is really quite boring and people might not do? rune mages can literally do ANYTHING you can think of better than any other unit in the game (provided you are willing to save 40 runes of whatever type applies to what you want to do)...


although yes i think repair droids could stand to receive a reduction either in power of their ability, or be moved to charges?

tl;dr; rune mages are broken in every single imaginable way, we need a mod to put the rune mages from kb:cw in place of kb:wotn rune mages