No, I was playing against Hard AI who were wayyyyyy ahead of me on the tech tree. These were full-size regiments with metal armor/weapons, when I still had leather armor and maces or whatever.
Beyond that, as I mentioned, you don't NEED to be super high level to get this kind of power. Spell damage is extremely flat, it only increases via two things: more shards (I rarely get this bonus) and % damage increases from traits or items. I never had any items that boosted it, but you can get the path of the mage bonus (50%) and one evoker bonus (50%), doubling your damage in just a few quick levels. Because Fireball/Blizzard/Curse of whatsitsname damage is multiplied by the number of figures, even a 'mild' amount of damage like 6 becomes 12 becomes 60 on a 5 unit figure, straight out of the gate. You don't even need high Int or high Level, neither of those has anything to do with base spell damage.
But fixing it is pretty simple, they just need to tone down initiative, lots of ways to do that:
- Randomize the init bonus from turn to turn. Init 20 doesn't give 20 'speed' every turn, it gives a weighted random value between X and 20
- Randomize the first turn order, if all init values are within X of each other
- Reduce the effect of extremely high init, each point past X gives less than a full points worth of speed
That's just off the top of my head, there are other methods that could be used to tinker with it. I'm also pretty sure Haste is bugged, I don't think a 2 point init boost should be giving an extra turn immediately every time.
As for aoe spells, allowing defenders the ability to spread out their units _before_ the battle starts (think HoMM Tactics style placement or similar) would also help.
Smoothing out spell damage progression would help as well - tie it to Int and Level with traits and items providing a smaller bonus. Right now, you get huge spikes in damage from picking up a few traits or items, and no benefit whatsoever from raising int or leveling, which isn't inherently bad, albeit somewhat counter-intuitive.
And finally deciding how to handle multi-figure damage. Having it tied to aoe spells makes logical sense (and gives a role to casters vs melee for multi-figure units vs heroes/monsters), but it's tuned to cause instant death too easily right now.
