Banshees will kill your entire army if you don't have some way of hitting them with enough magic damage. Even if you can inflict magic damage they can do a lot more damage than you would expect when facing one unit which is officially "Medium" difficulty, I think.

Ignys are usually very easy to kill. Even the groups of 3 don't take much to kill.

Air (really, any) shrills are far easier than their rating.

Air shrills easy? They are a nightmare early on, you know they are easy to kill, but those static blasts or whatever it is just keep killing your units/champions

I want your RNG, my units never resist. You playing with ironeers or something? (I play ridicilous setting on mobs, so maybe lower shrill levels help you as well?)

I find that those three demons protecting the Ascian Collar are REALLY easy to beat. Maybe the threat level is right....but this battle should be more difficult.

The cooldown was removed as of 1.1 I believe...

Butchermen can be surprisingly tough at the start of the game. A couple of times I've been cleaning out all the weak lairs around my capital, moved onto medium lairs, until there's just been a medium butcherman lair. And I look at it and think, "how hard can it be? Low hitpoints, no armour, small unit sizes... I'll burn a bit of mana and it will be fine." And then they kill my entire army.

The problem is that if they kill one of your units they gain a unit member, which can tilt the battle quite dramatically in their favour. Bearing in mind they have high initiative and high critical chance and counterattacks, when you have weak starting units with low hitpoints and minimal armour, the chances of them killing one of your units is quite high.

I'd put Assassin Demons and maybe even Corpse Spiders in the same category. I don't think the Threat rating is too low exactly, not like Banshees, but they need to be treated with respect. Go in with a stronger army than them and it should be straightforward. Go in with an equal or weaker strength army, relying on your superior tactical abilities etc., and you can find yourself losing pretty rapidly. High initiative, counterattacks and high poison can make for a bad day at the office. High initiative, counterattacks, criticals and gaining unit members when they kill your units can bring your plans for world domination to an abrupt halt.

Just my opinion on the shrills; I have been playing on Hard/Expert and don't recall ever even having a close fight.  They only do about 2-3 damage with each shot and, for me, don't seem to focus fire often compared to ranged units in a faction's army.  Then they go down in one shot from anyone once you get to them.  And water shrills will just sit there and spam slow on units that are already slowed... 

Sure, I wouldn't take my Sov and two starting units against them on turn one and expect to come out unscathed, but they're usually listed as "Strong" groups if there are 5+ of them, and I just don't think they stack up against, say, a group of silt skaths/hergons and a troll.  Or a single Umberdroth.  But then it's obvious the game has a pretty wide view of any particular strength level, other than weak.  "Strong," especially, covers a very wide spectrum...

Side note: they're especially easy if you play a Beastlord, as a lot of the low-level beasts move incredibly fast and can close on the shrills in one turn [scratches Timber Wolf behind the ear].  Or if you've gotten wolves or archers from quests.

I definitely agree on the darklings and ophidians.  

Regarding banshees, they're hard to rate because yes they'll kill your whole army if you don't know they can't be hit with weapons the first time you face them [blush], but one Flame Dart and they're toast.

The typical Haunter-led armies seem to be somewhat underrated; the beasts ALL use poison, and haunters use both Mass Curse and Curse of Cyndrum.  Poison is somewhat nasty given the difficulty of increasing resistance to it -- there's Trog blood, but you probably aren't getting that in any quantity; and it's not covered by Nature's Cloak the way fire/lightning/cold are.

Agree. Good for leveling early.

Casting Wither on Darklings can reduce them to zero attack, at which point it becomes a walk in the park, regardless of how many units they have.