Hello Catwalk,
well, I have to admit I just failed at my first attempt on Impossible - still using MoM version 1.31 for this. I'm not a veteran player yet. I just started MoM a few months ago. I was amazed I could go up to hard level in that time. Compared with related games (Civ I, MoO, Age of Wonders) that was a fast progression to hard level for me. In Civ I and in MoO I'm actually still struggling at hard level. Here I don't even know everything about the game yet and I'm winning quite comfortably on hard level.
But the jump to Impossible seems to be much larger than the move from Normal to Hard. In 1411 of the game, where I had to give up, the AI had all the strongest units in the game: Paladins, Griffins, Stag Beetles, you name it - they had it. My best units at that time where Lizardmen Javelineers and I was still at the point where it would take me 4 turns to produce one unit of those. No way to win that one at my present stage of experience. I think I will stay at hard level for quite a while.
So I'm not in for tournaments yet. But I still do not think Dwarves are the very strongest race in the game. They are among the stronger races though. Actually I would have a hard time picking the one and only strongest race. I find there are a number of top races that are pretty much equal in strength. I definitely agree that Gnolls are the weakest race. And Barbarians are one of the weaker races too (despite their thrown attack). Klackons are actually not that bad - when they are your main race (not when you just conquered some
cities of them). I would rate Klackons as being somewhere in the middle. Lizardmen evolve faster than Klackons so I would put them in the upper middle group, maybe together with Halflings and Orcs. I would place Dark Elves amongst the very strongest races though - they are quite a bit stronger than High Elves. Their units use magical ranged attacks, which do more damage than arrows and are harder to avoid. And Nightmares are much tougher than their counterpart Pegasi. Also Nightmares seem to be much more resistant to magic than Pegasi. Dwarves might be on level with High Elves (lower rank of the top group). I'm not decided whether to rate Highmen as equally strong as Dark Elves. Apart from Pikemen and Paladins they are not outstanding. They lack flying units and good ranged units. Early in the game Highmen are quite hard to play. Nomads should be in the lower rank of the top group as well. Trolls, Draconians and Beastmen are somewhere in the middle group - not really amongst the strongest races - but not really weak either.
However, I like the idea of making the race choice cost picks. That way you get to pick more retorts when taking Gnolls.
When looking at your screenshots I figured that there may have been some visual changes in the mod as well. Your screenshots from Myrror do not look so dark. I first thought, you did not even start on Myrror because of that. Or did you do some changes to that yourself?
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