[namad]

I suppose it's true that chargers+runic word is infinite mana, the reason I compared to magic spring was that a) magic spring was brought up by someone else and b) chargers+rune mage works as well or better in that it would allow a non-soothsayer to generate his infinite mana ~twice as fast it's true that basically everything a rune mage does can be done without a rune mage simply by casting lots of spells, but getting a 0mana cost additional powerful spell every turn is basically what the rune mage brings to the table with those spells being phantom/runic word/ and some sort of powerful attack spell for which laser isn't quite an exact spell.


the reason I brought up sacrifice is for if you plan to add non-droids to your droid army, in which case the only way to make use of the repair droids ability on all of your army is with sacrifice.


if you want to go with a pure droid army something like guard droid+repair droidx4 or something like that fine, go ahead, there might be some fights that army has trouble with, there might not be.


I guess the reason I'd say repair droids are less broken than rune mages is just that there is some drawback to using them, your proposed 3stacks of droids army definitely has trouble in the offense department. repair droids deal less damage than many other troops, and guard droids do as well, then of course you're only using 40% of your leadership so that particular army would have maybe ~70% less offensive ability than some other armies. the army may be indestructible, but it's got less offense, that's a drawback even if it's not a very big drawback, winning almost any fight, but you have to be bored to win them...

whereas basing things around rune mages you may be slightly less invincible, but your offense is quite high, it's hard to envision any scenario in which a rune mage isn't just flat out the best unit in the game in every single regard, because if any other unit were ever better, all you'd do would be use both, and then 60% phantom for 0mana on turn1 the better troop. the best troop in the game < rune mages + 60% of the best troop in the game (unless I suppose you think ice or black dragons are best in which case it doesn't work)..

that's what made rune mages in kb:cw fair, they're phantom ability was I believe based around leadership, not percent, and also targeted enemy units, meaning you could never ensure you'd get something good!

In a king's bounty game where there were 5 different troops that were mechanical that you could have in your army, then yeah, repair droids would be the stupidest most broken thing of all time for sure. I'm just saying the designers thought that as a compensation for having the ability to only heal 2 out of 100 possible troop types in our game we'll make it heal for bonkers insane amounts.


tl;dr; repair droids could be balanced fairly simply by a mod that just changes the amount of life healed on the ability to whatever is deemed appropriate, so if they're that bad, just do that if you want! as far as rune mages go, it's somewhat hard to even imagine a way to balance them, simple number changes probably aren't enough? the way they're designed is just sort of flawed through and through