[Suggestion] Balancing Champions - One champion per army limit . . .

There is already going to be an exp split for champions. So at leastthey wont be able to level in stacks of doom.

I'l just wait and see how that turns out

O  and once they balance the insane movement and intititive items and abilities in the game champions should improve.

I don't like it. We already have a completely artificial "army size" limit, and it completely breaks immersion.

i'd rather see other types of army compositions encouraged rather than the hero-stack purely disallowed

* make regular units more interesting (not necessarily stronger, but more varied, have tactical abilities and work together better)

* make a Generalship tree so that you can groom heroes to be a commander like you say

* Nerf especially teleport , but maybe also raise land, lower land, etc., so that it's harder for any one stack to be a large empire's entire military

* Meaningful injuries (even if they just have to return to a hospital to shake it off) make you value cannon fodder

* Also the hero recruitment system is strange.  They're practically free, and yet they're the most limited & non-renewable resource.  

That will prevent the champions from levelling too quickly but I still think eventually you will still just end up with the stacks of doom. We would still want XP split up evenly between the champion and the standard units in his/her army though.

You are right though that change should be in the next patch so we will see how it balances things out from there first.

It does seem like an artificial limit but it does make sense when you think about how armies work in real life but then again this is a fantasy game so I guess even that point is moot.

I think the army size limit is actually explainable in terms of command logistics on the battle field (IC) and research for larger armies adds something to the game so I like that. A one champion per army limit could be explained in terms  of ego call them commanders or leaders rather than champions if you like, but I like the idea.

Good idea.  I play on ridiculous level.  The early phase of the game is tough and fun.  If one champion per army, then the early game needs to be  balanced a little, maybe with cheap regular units.  Champion takes up 2 or 3 slots is also a good idea.  We can also give a class to those champions, wizard, warrior, rogue, etc and limit what type of armor/item they can use.  For example, in most RPGs, wizard gets penalty for wearing heavy armor or not able to wear it at all.

What is the point of the army size limit anyway? :P 

Sun Tzu says commanding a large force is the same as commanding a small force.  But, that being said, the current game mechanic is fine, doesn't matter really either way.  I rarely have a need for an army of more than 6 any way.

Think about the logisitics of commanding a huge army. There's a reason they are split up into platoons, companies, etc . . . Think of each stack as a platoon and all of your platoons as your entire army. So in a sense there really is no limit to your army but you are only able to manage a portion of it at a time.

See that's the thing because currently all you need is an army of 3 or so champions to win the game thats why you never had a need of more than 6. Think of how different it would be if you were limited to only 1 champion or you could only fit so many champions in your army? You would have to think and strategize a lot more about the compisition of your army instead of just sticking all your strongest champions in it and mopping floor.

Actually, most of my armies were 1 or 2 champion and 5 groups of 7soldiers.  

I commend you Xia for actually taking the time to train and use the standard units. It seems forced whenever I did it. (As in forced by me just for the sake of it, not by a need in the game.) I actually never even bothered most of the time as anyone in this game can beat it on the hardest dfficulty by just using your sovereigns and the chapions you pick up along the way.

I did train a few standard units for defence but even those weren't needed as I was never once attacked. Had an outpost or two raided but that was easily dealt with with my stack of doom. Actually garrisonning those with an affective army seems like such a waste of resources. Maybe I'm just getting lucky that the AI isn't up to snuff yet though.

I actually found that taking the time to research the warfare techs actually slowed down my progress because, once again, standard units were not at all needed. Not to mention the money I save on army maintenance and the fact that I had no need for metal or crystal.

I will force myself to use a mixed army in the next update though and see how well that plays.

Champions consuming more than one slot is an interesting idea.. but as champions don't really start to shine until they reach a certain level/or ammount of gear, you would have to base this around their current power rating. Which hmm... actually..

Perhaps army size should really be a function of 'power rating'.. On second thought, that would require the game had a firm grasp on the strength of each individual unit (and it clearly rates mages far too low), and would require a whole set of new programming.

Okay sorry babbling; addressing your initial post, no let's not see a champion limit to 1. These ideas are sugar coating over the real issue that champions are busting everyone's chops before chainmail is researched. Give me a viable reason to have a solo champion leading an army and I will do it.

Agreed, Plus, I'd like to be able to have my King and his most loyal Knights riding out together on quests to save the world. One hero per army balances stuff but ruins gameplay.

No.  You may as well remove Quests & all the other rpg aspects then, not that there aren't some on the forums campaigning for that anyway...

1H/A should be only one option among many. The key is to give significant incentives to Warfare minded players to specialize in Leadership. Path of the Leader would give unit stat bonuses to regular soldiers per level, offer special abilities that buff all regular troops, increase movement, give bonuses to whole army when on certain tiles, give bonuses to whole army when attacking a city. 

That would give the player some serious incentive to go the leader route. I still want the other routes to be viable. 

why remove all quests and rpg aspects too? one hero per army has nothing to do with that. you can still quest as one or several armies . . . and still retain all the RPG elements. i don't get what you are getting to here.

the consensus though is that one hero per army is a bad idea and i guess a little extreme. i somewhat agree.

i still believe having them count as more than one unit slot makes sense though. there should be a legit trade off to choosing to place this champion in your army instead of a standard unit.

[An Inn on Elemental]

Bard: I will sing you the tale of the villainous Brunthus the Tenebrous!  

Villager1: Boring! Sir Roderick took his 200 men and massacred the poor sod.  

Bard: Oh, errr, the story of Hatian's staff?  

Villager2: Stolen by a Fire Elemental? "Bravely" returned by Ailsa the Ironeer, with her archer divisions help?  

Bard: that would be the one. Humm. How about the recovery of Moriah's Lost Spell Book?  

Villager1: I've not heard that one! Does it involve a band of hero's on epic quest to find lost knowledge and restore the land to its former glory? (He said hopefully)  

Bard: Not as such, there is a Hero! 

Villager3: And? 

Bard: The entire Krax mounted legion, with 2 engineer corps, 16 catapults and a troop of ogre allies. 

Villager2: No. anything else? 

Bard: Well no. The gods cursed our heroes with magical restraining orders preventing them from being within 50 feet of each other. 

Villager3: Why would they do that? 

Villager1: Yea that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! 

Innkeeper: Don't get me started, My Daughter has been kidnapped by Slavers! I can't afford to hire the entire local garrison to get her back.  

Villager1: We could do it!

Bard: No! 

Villager3: Yea, I was in the reserves!

Bard: Wait! Stop!

Villager2: Lets do it!

Bard: NO!

[A terrible sound of cracking bone as the 3 villagers are flung in opposite directions to crash into the inns walls. All three land in contorted piles obviously dead.]

Innkeeper: What happened! 

Bard: The curse of Legaceez! They became Heroes and so could not exist near each other.

Innkeeper: What a messed up world we live in. Oh and cleaning that lot up is coming out of your tab.

[Fade to black]

IN all seriousness how do ANY of the current quests make sense for anything other than a small group of Heroes, maybe with some troops to back them up for the larger fights? 

You sir crack me up thank you for the laugh

And early game I NEED my 1 new hero to help the sovie take out the 1st few wimpy monsters.

Penalties aren't fun. There needs to be some incentive to spreading your heroes around, but for those who prefer throwing them in the same army limiting them to one per would be breaking their game experience.

An idea I mentioned in another thread would be to be able to assign a champion as a leader of an army, but this would not limit the champions in an army. What the leader would do is pass some bonuses based on his/her traits to the armies regular troops (not champs to avoid making them stronger), this way if you want you can keep your champs together, or spread the leaders around for better armies.

But I'm completely agains't limiting champs to just one per army.

I think we should try to focus on thinking of ways to make the player decide "Hmmm do I want to make an uber champ stack of doom or split my champ up because I would get X benefit?". Interesting choices, yes plz.

Really fun.

Maybe a quest like that "you have to lift a heroes curse".

There are a lot of ideas floating around the forums to balance champions. I'd probably prefer the idea of dialing back high end gear, particularly weapons, and instituting a level cap while rebalancing gains to give one trait every other level, or even nerfing the stats heroes start with. Restricting army size, and making champions take up extra space.. is a bad solution, I think. Although my opinion isnt worth all that much, I dont use heroes very often.

"Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals." - Sun Tzu

Yeap, yeap.. Sun Tzu says that.

I agree with you pretty much 100%, don't need much to get the job done right now. Bigger battles would be great.

lol I conceded BeardyDan that was quite the amusing read. I see that the want to send off your group of heroes on an epic quest is strong indeed. I guess I was thinking more in terms of a game like HOMM which all had one hero per army. Expcept for part 4 which ironically enough had many complaints about the overpowered hero stacks.

I guess what you guys really want from this game is more of a D&D/Never Winter Nights/Dragon Age game with some Civ on the side. More controlling individual heros than large armines. Which I do enjoy as well but for some reason I pictured this game as more of a Civ with some D&D on the side. It is a fine balance I suppose which is leaning towards the more epic quests side as the Civ building part of the game is pretty lackluster as is.

Maybe I am abastracting it too much but I still always pictured seperate stacks as part of the same army or quest acting about the same time. Sure they don't all act at the same time because of the turn based game constraints but I imagine everything happeneing in a season as almost taking place simultaneously. While this hero stack and that hero stack adjacent to it aren't in the same battles I picture them as being on the same battle field. Makes sense at all? . . . I still believe at least limiting the heroes per stack is a good idea. Think about it in all those fantasy games/novels/books how often do a band of six god like characters team up on a quest? It's usually just one or two such characters. Heck even in Game of Thrones it's one or two "champions" and an entire army.

He's wrong.  Read Sherman's autobiography (which is where the idea came from to limit army sizes).

There is a BIG difference between commanding 3 units and 6 units (pretend that the units in FE have 500 people each if you'd like).  The point is, feeding, supplying, and maintaining an army changes dramatically as the army size grows.  Luckily it's a medieval army so it's not as bad. 

There's a reason why the German barbarians weren't able to run around with 100,000 soldiers at once.  The size of an army is ultimately dependent on the logistical knowledge of the civilization in question.