(tried to add a screenshot of the depths, didn't work)

FM warships' main drawback is being several turns behind the leader, because of build time. 4 turns plus reaching might mean 30-40% of the decisive frst 20-25 turns. And they're often slower than the leaders, although they can bring the leader back in the action very quickly from some target in an impasse.
Don't get me wrong, they are useful, especially to lug around stacks of archers but with Southern's items list troops matter relatively less. So when you compare with haste and flight, well, there's no comparison.

I've summoned far less than you. Mostly keeping an eye on the dark elf leader - moving in and out of his vision each turn. Oh - and helping with walled cities - one bird can force the battle to start without any wall crusher. A medalled up eagle with bless and enchanted weapon is quite powerful! Yes, dark gift if the worst buff, even fire halo is better.

Blimey, looks like I have a LOT of editing to do. I like the idea of permitting FM dragonships to compete with spammed eagles, that's my kind of balancing.

Items - I've already made a somewhat toned down item list, I think this game was started with the original 100% bonkers one. However, I could tone down the items a little more, plus I could also change the dungeons to only have small rewards (1 item) instead of random (1-3 items)

Map was/is also totally overdone in terms of low gold and slow travel. I can definitely open up the tunnels, grant both UG players extra starting tunnelers, and I can even add roads underground by using steppe terrain. I can add more structures and maybe another teleporter?

I hope I haven't come off as complaining about the map. I like really a lot the idea of a slow start map, but air spheres are not fixable on this setup, and FM ships do nothing at all to balance them. IMHO to fix Towers you only need to change the spheres removing air and, if you want to keep some air magic around, put it in the towers in hard to access locations so that it doesn't affect the first 20-30 turns. Any further balance would be fine tuning.

Removing Air feels too much like a negative, no-fun allowed act. I'd rather ameliorate it by increasing the role of armies in this map, maybe removing a node per player (along with removing a level of spellcasting from each player's three starting wizards), reducing the number of items. And sure FMDS won't necessarily do much, especially not reliably, against air, but at least it's a different powerful thing that's available to the opposed sphere.

Just playing a 1v1 with Thereunto on Kolusurt and I got, from the first dungeon site, three items which in total granted +2 DEF, Lightning Strike, Fire Breath, Life Stealing, Cause Fear, and fire/lightning protection. Lol. I like my item set and I am not going to bother to change it - making it was a slog - but I deffo can set the dungeons to only give up one item at a time. IIRC, that's what 'low' 'medium' and 'high' dungeon rewards mean in the map editor - 1, 2, 3 items.

So in this game, we had 1-3 items (2 average) from dungeons, if that's changed to 1, then that halves the whole OP hero item gathering aspect, and if gold amounts are increased, then that also makes earlygame superunits (including the vexatious Eagle) less dominant, since they are more outnumbered than before.

FM almost is Wind Walking, except earlier to reach, cheaper to cast, and cheaper to maintain. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only things WW does that FM doesn't is let the unit cross water, cross lava, and interact with Air Mastery.

In this map, boats would have been much faster than my leader stack. DS have 32 move compared to spiders 28, and FM would let them cross all the terrain at only 4 move per hex.

Haste is good if you have the mana, but it is very expensive very quickly to support on a serious number of units. I couldn't afford it, especially since I didn't have any way of healing except time.

I agree about the items, though. I thought I was just about set when I acquired Fire, Lightning, Cold, Magic, and Death immunity from only 3 item slots, but it still couldn't compete with the Entangle Strike, Life Stealing, healing from Life magic, and the masses of (altered stat!) units from Dominate.

Ah. Spiders took care of keeping my leader stack in combat. Sending birds with anything else for walls would have been ineffective, since the birds would have died before the fighting finished and pushed me out; I was stuck using rams.

Dark Gift is lovely for melee offense, between the boost to Damage and Death Strike boosting that further.

If you look at the dwarven setup on the map, there are a handful of winding tunnels and fingers that lead to different crypts / ruins / etc. By bringing the boat close enough, leaving the ship and then using all of the leader's movepoints, you have covered 4 turns worth of travelling in 2 turns if you intend to return to your original position. We can cover even more ground if we consider town-gating with boats (and it reduces the risks of blind warp party). We can cover larger distances with FM boats if there are common back-and-forth areas that you need to get across.

If I'm travelling in a straight line to one objective, haste on a leader is going to work wonders. If I can afford to take a few turns to build a boat while I'm carefully raiding early-game crypts, I'll take the FM boat. Tunnelling too. I can move a mole-rider into position and use it to dig on the same turn with FM boats, I'll have delayed tunnelling with a hastened mole.

FM boats are also helpful for crossing the underground mountains and small patches of water with a party. Instead of having to cast WW on each unit to get over the mountains, a single boat can ferry them along.

Who has the save? I've been watching for it so I can go ahead and pass it along, but I haven't seen it yet.

Oh and no worries, I'm the one who should worry about exhausting people's patience with my maps :p

My bad, turn sent.

Here's the thing: FM boats need 4 turns+ to be built, the game is decided in 20 turns, so even if by chance they were enough to ensure balance that's still a lot of the decisive time without balance.

And no, they're not enough. Especially with several starting heroes, so that you cover all directions anyway from your start.

Even if they did, it'd just mean that 2 spheres are better than the other 4. But it's really just air.

Decide :P
We wouldn't be discussing balance if your maps weren't worth it :)
Why don't you consider the idea of letting air magic in only after a while, through towers? Or events perhaps, if that works.

I kind of feel like you being able to send your heroes in multiple directions at once says something about the quality of your start. :D

I stand by both my statements. Dark Gift IS wonderful for melee offense, but birds, especially solo birds, aren't melee offense units. They are too fragile and expensive to be used like that.

Dark Gift is for units like leaders, warlords, Titans, etc, maybe even cavalry if you have spare mana. +1 damage costs 10 skill points while attack and defense each cost only 5 skill points. Death Strike means you might be getting more than +1 damage out of the spell if the target survives the first hit and suffers the curse effect.

After thinking about it a bit more, I probably will remove all air spheres and node, and make the wizard's towers give out the interesting air spells as a reward. After all, there's five players, so it's convenient distributing spheres among them with only five to choose from.

Yes of course, but we were talking about birds. Looks like we agree ;-p

Looking at the map you could send them in different directions too - east bridge, south bridge and from there tunnels.

Oh I didn't mean on their own, I meant with archers once the first few are built. The start is slow that's granted, but it seems to be the same for every player. I personally like this, not in every map, but in this map - it gives a feeling of identity to the map.