Um... Lucky is a faction trait. Wraith is a race. You can make a custom wraith faction with lucky, without taking binding or cult of hundred eyes (both are pretty pointless now that the basic troops are so much better), and without the no armor penalty even.
Not pointless at all, since production costs for your basic troops will be significant, and available defenses are already quite good without the dodge, and with binding and cult of hundred eyes you get cheap boosts to damage, which can be quite useful for defending cities and cleaning up things you do not have time to deal with. And unless you invested some serious effort into them (efforts that could have been used to achieve something else), you'll be doing maybe 1 damage against gilden's troops (which will have some stacked accuracy, if I recall correctly.)
Gilden's blood trait is also very strong (hence why the AI is often very good with Gilden), but if you honestly think Ironeer troops are better than Wraith troops right now, then you obviously haven't tried the dodge builds I've mention before. You can't kill, what you can't hit, it doesn't matter how many HP you have if you have 3% chance to hit. With Lucky, my Shadowblades are pushing 90+ dodge (acrobat and some levels). My sovereign, going with path of assassin and picking up their dodge traits is just as untouchable. +30 accuracy doesn't help nearly as much as you think, just try it, you have a late game resoln going right? The only way to counter this level of dodge is to use spells or skills that guarantees a hit. Neither of which are available to troops.
And there's no counter for them to use against my path, either -- between wither and blood sigil, the defenses on my grave elementals (which is to say: no armor and no dodge) have been adequate against most non-magical opponents for quite a long time. Juggernauts, for example, get a damage multiplier, and I reduce their base damage before that multiplier takes effect when I am fighting them using grave elementals - but in this game, I have only kingdom sovereigns so the only juggernauts I have faced have been the escaped kind.
That said, it might very well be that there needs to be another +accuracy trait available for troops, or perhaps some piece of +accuracy gear.
Still, you can also research +10 accuracy for your troops, and if I had researched warfare and had two passes of refined training instead of researching magic and having done two passes of refined arcana, I'd be able to build +50 accuracy troops at level 5 (with +15 from fort bonuses, along with precision and disciplined). And of course, I'd be able to wear armor for damage reduction if I was playing a faction like gilden.
Also, are you SERIOUSLY saying that dirge is a broken "I WIN" button when you have THAT many death shards? (Of course you're not going to care about mana when you have that much). That game was over ages ago. I'm not sure why you're even going on with that let alone use it as an example. The Blindness strategy is particularly powerful right at the beginning of the game, when you can dominate the strongest mobs with almost no effort.
How many death shards do you think I had? I did try to mention that it was an I win button when it did a quarter of its current damage.
Anyways, I have almost 3x spell damage from spell damage multipliers, and I've not been playing long enough to be offered the evoker iii level up trait. A few turns later my dirge damage is 121 because I've picked up another five shards. (But it is true that I am no longer rushing altars.)
Anyways, I am still playing in part because I am also studying the game. (And, I wanted to kill a river slag with solo pioneers and with 107 damage on dirge, I did not have enough shards to do that.) And it was not that many turns ago where the outcome was in doubt: I'm playing on ridiculous, and this was my first resoln game since 1.1 came out -- my next play through I'll change things to increase the difficulty. And even with 121 damage from dirge, I just now was in a battle against poison immune opponents where they managed something like 80 magical damage on my sovereign -- it's true that that was an optional battle, but it's not like the map has no challenges.
As for strong monsters in the early game, keep in mind that graveseal can be used on an opponent that is suffering from dirge. And, also, it costs production and/or gildar just to get those shards in the first place. And there are various things you can research to improve dirge's usefulness (almost none of which are in the warfare tree -- in this game I did not even need warfare to get a horse, and I have quests turned off -- my research has been only in civilization and magic).
