age of wonders planetfall kirko hero abilities

Shakarn would need you to go all the way up to Caste Advancements at T7 for assault exoskeletons, which is a serious investment, but on the other hand assault exoskeletons are REALLY GOOD and can go on any Kir'Ko unit at all, so it might be worth it. Even in extremis, you can always hope to find an indie dwelling of a race that'll give you an early stagger mod - Amazon, Vanguard, Dvar, they all work.

Kir'Ko/Celestian is a popular way of fixing it, but they're not locked into that combo, there are other valuable ways to play. The lack of stagger resist is irritating though, yeah. They might seem like fragile scouts, but flying gives them some evasion and they have that gunk shot. It's gotten some buffs but it's still not fantastic - some will argue you should use the Unleashed instead. Their starting melee unit, the Frenzied? Yeah that's best avoided. Mantra of Clarity's a good one there, 20% evasion is decent.

It's also quite viable to use Transcendants to fight with - they might be classed as a support unit, but 8 repeating damage isn't much below par for T2 skirmishers, once you account for psi ignoring armour, and the combo of regeneration + pain links can be pretty solid, especially since psi mods work with psi buffs. A teleporting sniper that can stack evasion and ignores armour can easily be a huge deal that'll carry you into the T3 stage of the game.

The Hidden is definitely not 'semi-weak'. Insofar as there's a multiplayer meta, the general reckoning is Assembly are on top (not for having better units it's their economy, they get a few ways of acquiring bonus resources from winning fights, and it can stack hard if you know what you're doing), everybody else lags very slightly behind, and depending on who you ask, Dvar might lag slightly further behind than most. As a rule of thumb, none of the factions are 'just crap', the game is actually remarkably well balanced.

Age of wonders planetfall kirko hero abilities