Agreed. I think if heroes die, they should get scars even if their side wins the battle.

How about level requirements for more of the gear?

I agree heroes can be toned down but the biggest problem is the lack of aggressive neighbors.  I was playing with on med map, normal with moderate monsters and once I cleared the area around my cities they were never attacked.  It is too easy to set off on an endless adventure with your heroes and never break up the "Killer stack". Having to defend more would really change the way I played and rolled with my heroes.  Some possible fixes...

-  more places to defend

- more attacks from the wild

- better, more aggressive computer AI (even though on a med. map kingdoms were pretty far away from each other). 

Unless keeping your champions and sovereigns within their home cities provides a substantial technology/resource bonus, linking items to level (which some of them already are) does not make steamrolling the map any less than the optimal solution to winning the game.

Items should instead be linked to technology (preferably part of the adventuring tech line), forcing the player to at least stay on par in empire management with the competition. Although I would be okay with bonuses to 'stay at home' heroes as the alternative.

I think right now players who only build hero-only armies have a huge advantage  because A) Heroes are cheaper than regular soldiers Heroes don't need to be produced in cities C) Heroes are very powerful even without any techs from the tech three.

I just started a new game. It is season 12, and I have already found items worth 2500 gildar. That is not balanced at all. I could sell them, and make my empire much more powerful. Or I can just equip them and conquer the world. The nice items (worth more than 100g) must be guarded, or at least require some technology.

I would like them to be guarded or better yet, be achievable from (non-starting) quests. This way there would also be more feeling of achievement. In addition, the starting level quests give you 100g if you do something, but the "do nothing" loots next to it can give you 1000g items.

I think balancing the heroes would be easier if there is a cap at level 10 and the XP rewards are reduced to 50 %.

Taking Wizard1200's idea even further... give the heroes a starting soft level cap of about 4 after which they gain maybe 25-35% xp and then adding a few techs to perhaps the warfare tree that can increase that soft cap by another 4 or so levels. This way it will hopefully keep heroes from outpacing armies too quickly and sort of make you have to choose between the two options for a military.

yes, like i said already THIS is the problem

its not too fast or too easy or anything 

the problem is you can do WHATEVER you want, literally, and there is no consequence for that

heroes should be needed to defend both from monsters and from enemies, since they are not you can free farm+

and they should die, sometimes, maybe add a resurrection spell or something like cheat death, but being ALWAYS immortal is no good

no... playing heroes is the most fun things, why would you want to prevent ppl to do it?

just balance a few OP trait/item and fix all other things, but many levels is a fun part of that

That is a great idea. The basic level cap could be 5 for heroes and armies. Heroes could advance beyond that cap to level 10, but only gain 25 % of the current XP and one warfare tech could increase the XP to 50 %.

I think heroes with a level cap are more fun, because the player has to think very carefully about the talent selection, and it would increase the replay value, too.

Hmm, I like the idea of a level cap, maybe it could be increased a few times by certain technologies or super-hard-to-get treasures, but there should be a maximum level.  However perhaps you could still get extra hitpoints from more experience above that, but stat increases and extra abilities would stop occurring.

Agree... It would be good if a hero added a significant bonus and could even level running a city.  This would give another option on how to use heroes and offer another play style.

There should also be monthly wages for heroes, standard units are way more costly.

Limit armor and weapon use based on warfare tech line is a good idea.

My next game I'm going unit heavy to see if I get any other ideas.

you can do this

i dunno how effective it is but there is a building giving heroes some small xp if stationed in the city

I like this idea, and maybe the maintenance ought to be based on the heroes level.

Hero maintenance would be a good step to take. 

I also like the idea that you have to be researching to get high levels for your heroes. I may be a minority on that as it makes no logical sense, only game sense. 

I definitely agree with having a hero level cap that increases as you research certain techs. That should help keep them from getting too far ahead of the other units.

Level caps = epic fail.  Try EVERYTHING else first.

Going back to the hero maintenance idea, when a hero is about to level up it should say somewhere on the splash screen something like "Hey boss, I feel like I've worked very hard for you over the past few seasons.  I demand a 1.7 gildar per season wage increase if you want me to continue performing better." Then you can select whether you want the character to level or not. If not, you can choose to pay him/her off at any time in the future.

This.

I don't see what's so bad about level caps? It seems to me like the simplest way to ensure that they stay in step with the tech tree.

At the moment you have two parallel methods of increasing the power of your units: Research and levelling up. At the moment, levelling champions massively outpace research. Sure, you could nerf experience in some way, but then you run the risk of overcompensating and just having the exact opposite problem.

Even if you manage to balance for one particular map size/research rate, if you take that to a different game setup, it'll skew one way or the other. Tying levels to research solves (or, at least, simplifies) all these problems.

Because level caps are blunt and crude, and there are definitely more elegant yet simple ways of creating an organic and transparent sense of balance.

Also, in addition to having level prereqs for items, items ought to use attribute and skill prereqs.  This would certainly limit the amount and quality of items available to champions at early levels.

I think people complaining about heroes should bump up the difficulty level and play a few games, then come back and compare. I've been stampeded by enemy heroes and had mine squished into uselessness several times. I use my heroes more effectively than the AI for sure, but that's a balance issue that can be tinkered with down the line. I don't expect the AI to be fully aware of all strategic and tactical abuses, particularly with the vast number of spells in the game right now.

Losing a key hero for ~10 turns can turn the tide when you're playing against the more aggressive AI on the higher difficulties, in a recent game I lost my capital very early in the match due to exactly this.

One issue that I do find extremely annoying however - from what I can tell, if you incapacitate a hero, then attack the nearby city where they are healing, they appear to join the fight even though you just defeated them a turn or two ago - that is lame, they should be out of the game completely until they are restored.

We need to all be playing the same difficulty to compare at this stage. My criticism is that Normal seems more like Beginner. The AI just isn't good enough at leveling. 

Normal should be rated as normal and not as beginner.  Multiple times I had an outpost or a city completely unprotected and the AI did not destroy it or take it over.  And even sometimes the neutral creatures that had been incorporated into my territory didn't attack when they would have wiped out my only city's militia.