I do agree with the XP split.  I just think it's a little on the harsh side atm - perhaps some bonus xp could be given based on the number of heroes present, to bump it above a straight 50/50 split (more like 75/75 and so on.) 

I am really sorry to say, but this is just plain wrong.

Again, you are completely forgetting this game is RPG + 4X, and this analogy only works on RPG games, not RPG + 4X.

This gameplay has 3 massive advantages compared to

This.

[1] Actions-per-turn advantage.

Let's say moving to a destination and cleaning a lair takes three turns. If I split the armies into two. It will take three turns. If I combine both heroes, it will take about six turns. Do you see a problem? By combining two armies, I essentially increased the time needed to clear lairs = far less XP/turn than split army way. If it were RPG, it would had been hardly mattered. But this is RPG + 4X where time is also a resource in 4X.

[2] Area exploration advantage.

With splitting the armies, I see more area explored = more chance to find good city spot + resources + quest, etc. Moving two units at same time gives far more sight and area control than moving just one unit. This is so basic strategy knowledge, yet it seems so many people in this forum fail to recognize.

In an ideal situation, those two points should had been compensated by the fact that with one-hero army is far less capable of killing more difficult camp, thus split-army needs to spend more production for producing the troops. But here comes the problems with compensation, caused by 4X elements of the game:

1) Hero himself/herself is fairly weak early game. Unless the hero has fire2 and/or summoner profession, he/she has no offensive, direct-damaging spell or strong support spell. Any troops with maul-type attack can do serious damage to low-level heroes in general. And even if the hero's level is higher, he/she needs proper armor and weapon with right traits to be useful. This makes combining two heroes does not suddenly make the army stack better until mid-game.

2.) Army composition in this game is very small. Even with max upgrade, total of 9 unit is the max amount of unit I can have. Unless I research the Drill asap, the size of army in the early game is 5. With two heroes, I have one less slot for a troops, making the whole composition less effective unless hero's level is higher..... but this is early game, not mid game.

Because of these two effects, the compensation effect is rather weak. And by trying to overcome those compensations, the game style essentially becomes using very few heroes and some use of scouts..... to use those extra heroes as scouts to mend the problem further. This leads to:

[3] Production saving advantage.

This is combine effect of several points. First of all, using only few heroes needs fewer maintenance fees. Say using only 1 additional heroes instead of 3 will save me about 2 gilders per turn, after about 70 turn it is essentially a free pioneer. Regarding early game, it is a very crucial aspect. It also means with less spending, I can prolong 'no-tax' period so I get the most production and research.  

Thanks to those three points, 4X elements overshadow RPG element unless some good change on XP gain comes.

Due to the severity of the experience penalty for stacking champions, I rarely ever have more than one champion per army, unless they are both already at a high enough level that they aren't going to be leveling up any time soon anyways. I would like for the experience split to be toned back a little, or for it to go away. I don't really care which, but I would like for one or the other to happen. Currently, most of the early champions I get are more or less expensive governors since I can't really afford more than two main armies early in the game, and by the time I can afford additional armies the early champions are too underlevelled to be particularly useful to me.

Also, to the people who say that you don't lose any experience to the experience split:  trained troops, last time I checked, receive half of the base experience that a champion receives for a battle. If there are two champions, trained troops gain only half of what one champion would receive, rather than half the base value. This means that unless you only have champions present in your army, you are in fact losing potential experience for having the extra champion in your army.

There's also the little problem of one high-level champion being worth much more than two champions of half that level, unless the goal is creating mediocre governors.

I think it's rather telling that the only champion you cite as being useful is the commander, who specializes in making your empire and army better.  Yes, summoners are also very useful now, but they're able to conjure up an army for themselves.

EDIT: quoting multiple people in a single reply is wonky as hell, split into two posts.

So there are people who like the XP split, and some that don't.  I think that, while this is still a debatable topic, Stardock should focus on other areas where we can all agree the game needs changes, like bug fixes.  They can revisit the XP split at a later time when the less debatable aspects have been taken care of.

Have you played it without the XP split, or is this all hypothetical? You can mod the game to force an XP to be more linear, by granting a spell that is autocasted by every champion at the beginning of the battle. It would raise the bonus by a certain amount with only 1 unit, but with 2 it doubles that bonus. This could be placed in the game to allow for a shallower XP split. One of the bigger factors is the less dynamic world around. It is a clean the land around me and boom I've got myself, a clear area and saftey until that random event happens. But once you clean your area you have lost all XP potential from that area.

Maybe one should focus on creating a modded game where the XP potential is not removed when clearing your area, in fact it is increased the more you clear out the area. I've been contemplating on how to do this, but the creation of all the icons for the tiles I need just makes me dread the idea. But I think I'll get that done.

Yes I've played without the XP split and I could take it or leave it. It didn't help me much in leveling my heroes. By the time I get a second hero anyway I've already got a second army waiting for him to travel with. My 3 and 4 heroes also have armies by the time I get them as well (not just one units I'm talking at lest 2-4 units)... Also, when I get these heroes they are all the same level. Without the XP split... it's the same for my style of gameplay. The heroes I've got are Legendary, just not invincible.

^

That's how it is precisely. They are Legendary, but not invincible. You can't take a single hero and go wipe the map like a GOD. If you want to be a GOD then cast spell of making

Legendary? Really? When I can spend the whole game leveling them and barely make a dent in their skill trees? We're not asking for them to be invincible, we're asking for enough xp to be available to actually get all the cool abilities at the top of the tree that we want. Currently it's almost impossible to get a well rounded champion with a couple high level skills and one maxed out magic school. You might be able to get one high end ability unlocked if you beeline for it but that's about it.

When I can get more than one hero around level 20 in a game that is overflowing with monsters (as in dense monsters, above average wildlands, more frequent random events), without resorting to cheap tactics like lair farming or quest map spamming, I will be happy.  As it is, I can beat the game without a single hero breaking past the mid-teens.  That is not legendary.  At all.

Lol, that the expansion is called Legendary Heroes doesent mean that the champions should be Gods after a few battles. Some strange arguing by some here.

The steamroller effect is something a game like this have to have mechanisms to soften. Without the XP-split of heroes the game would be pretty unchallenging pretty soon, and the way to victory would be pretty one-sided; heroes leveling en masse. 

You are not supposed to fill in all abilities both on General tab and your specialization tab.... They are there to present choices. You have to specialize in something, there's no point to try to be master of all elements with last summons and all other spellcasting perks.

For example Assassin you can chose to go either for Bow related skills, or Melee ones, there's no point to try to get both since you can only have 1 single weapon equipped at a time. As a mage I'll decide if I want to play support or damage dealing, and spec accordingly.

There are not enough monsters on map to give you XP to push more heroes to a high level since the map is shared with other players, who do a good job in most cases to clear their sides of said mobs. Then you have the epic areas like the swamp or scrapyard, where you can venture to fight tough and epic fights to get couple levels. This is mainly a 4x game, not a pure RPG with a level cap which you reach before final boss fight.

The AI players won't wait for you to visit every single corner of map or kill every single wandering monster / lair, they will go for spell of making or domination (can't say I saw them trying diplomatic or master quest, suppose those are player only victory conditions), so no matter what you do you are forced to leave the wandering aside and take care of the matter at hand

There are a bunch of issues that, imho, ppl is trying to fix using the wrong mechanics. Before explaining the ideas I need to clarify how I perceive FE/LH... This is a Fantasy RPG strategy game which means that the only way to be fun for every1 is to add variety so effective challenge difficulty is based on the particular combination of strategies used/liked vs particular scenario you have to face.

Party Convergence. This is what ANY XP spliting algorithm should focus on: Dealing with different level heroes facing the same challenges together. It's important to have an independent mechanism like this so your single Hero leveling progression can be carefully adapted to the World Pace XP production. A Convergence Spliting XP algorithm should work like this:

* There should be a minimum of Challenges needed to get a level up. This could be translated to a max proportional XP earn a single challenge could yield. Example: If your only source of XP are fights, and you set your XP Cap at 50% Level XP, this would mean that a fresh Hero entering into Epic battles been "tutored" by more powerfull heroes would require at least 2 fights to level up.

* When a challenge is defeated by a team of heroes an even split should be applied but then each hero that is below the max should earn bonus XP. The details of the algorithm depends on how you define a "challenge". Example: Suppose your challenges are labeled by Levels and you have a very simple XP reward table based on the difference between hero level (HL) and challenge level (CL): 2+ = 10, 1 = 100, 0 = 200, -1 = 300, -2- = 500  (Notice that I do HL - CL, so positive indexes here are "easy" fights). This works nice and dandy with a single hero... But lets see what a Convergence split would do when 3 heroes A(10), B(8) and C(1) beat a Challenge of level 8. Each hero will earn 1/3 of what they would earn alone so the XP earned by each would be: A(10/3=3.3), B(200/3=66.7) and C(500/3=166.7) (For as long as none of the Heroes hit the MAX XP per challenge cap). Don't get too focused on the numbers but on the effects on the long run... The ABC party will, overtime, converge to the highest level while at the same time, the "XP creation" will self regulate itself as the difference between heroes become less and less.

Stack of Doom. XP spliting algorithm has nothing to do with this on a strategic context, and any attempt to "fix" this strategy by tweaking Hero progression is bound to fail. The solution lays into the core of any Fantasy setting... Power variety. Which is the Main Difference between Heroes vs Troop stacks? Individual versus Group. How about adding powerfull debuffing/disabling powers that affect 1 target? Example: A single target fear... Could be devastating applied on a Hero because all his/her fantastic capabilities will be lost for the duration of the Fear but... On a 4 men stack? It would just imply the stack will function at 3/4 power for as long as the Fear lasts. See? Variety beats world-wide rules ANY TIME OF THE DAY... Because it forces ppl to gather intel, think and adapt their strategies based on the enemies they have in front.

With the above 2 mechanisms in place, then you are free to adapt your single Hero leveling curve to the world you have and, in particular, to what a "Level up" means in terms of effective "power" increase, which is what LH is about, to increase the impact and customization of what a "level up" means. Meanwhile Troop stacks will retain their value because of their inherent resistance to Single Target effects (Notice that I just mentioned Crowd Control effects... But the Main Difference can also be applied to direct damage effects: The Ultimate Ray of Doom can do gazillions points of damage to a single target making it the Definitive weapon Heroes toss at each other but... What effect has to smelt a poor footman belonging to a hundred square formation?).

That is already in place. When you damage a group of archers, they lose 1-2-3-4-5-6 etc members depending on the quantity of damage they received. This diminishes their damage and HP as a group obviously. They still retain full functionality of any skills / traits / abilities they had, as expected.

What you propose with CC or debuffs to affect a single unit from a group makes no sense with how the game core mechanics for tactical combat are implemented. So if there's a pack of 5 wolves and I want to slow them down, I can only slow one wolf from that pack? Keep in mind that most debuffs don't have an AoE version, and even those who do, is split in 2 categories: very few affect ALL enemies, and others affect what you can target with a line of 3 squares, or a square with a side of 3. Regarding debuffs, groups are single units. Regarding damage / hp groups are composed of units - they can lose or regain members (if they are damaged, or healed for example).

The game is fine as it is, quantity of enemies you defeat has little relevance to amount of XP gained, it's their level (and also type, like bosses, dragons, epic monsters, or rare ones like Troll Shamans etc) that give you more xp - and that in relation with the level of your hero(es) and troops in your own group. If you have level 10 hero with level 6 troops beating on hordes of skeletons level 3, you will barely get any xp for that despite you felt like swiming in enemies. Go and do an epic quest and you'll see the difference. For example clear the swamp of all mobs and the epic boss, easy 3-5 levels

I think this has changed some in .87.

If you get a good weapon early one, a defender, warrior or assassin hero can be useful, depending on how things go.

If you get an early shard and the right champion, a mage hero is useful.  Healing especialy.

An issue here is warriors are gear dependent, mages are shard/level dependent (best fix here would be a rework of the mage tree), but commanders always useful, either for unrest and +Research (never +gildar, merchant tree needs to be buffed) or for army buffing.

I do think that getting it right is in reach now, .87 is getting there, I've spotted some real improvements- but the fundamental flaw of the game is the hero advancement trees having too many "empty steps"   There are still "knock-on"  legacy issues, where old mechanics/items that worked ok in the past don't work as well with the current changes. 

One idea: allow champions to pick from general traits (and expand them some) and class traits on each promotion, or maybe allow it on some levels.  So 2 traits per level.   Another option would be to lower XP needed to level up overall, and nerf the XP level up spells (which I really wish would go away, not a fan of those)

Not ATM... I think I didn't explain it properly, so I will try again with a numeric example. Each archer of your 6 men stack has 10 attack and 10 HP and next to it you have an Uber Ranger Hero with 60 attack and 60 HP... With the current implementation you cast a spell at BOTH that do 35 damage... Result? (Resulting HP is the same = 25 Hp left):

- Archer Stack = 30 attack.

- Hero = 60 attack minus wound penalties (last full LH playthrough was at 0.80 version and this were barely noticeable at all).

Now lets model this attack as Single Target on my approach and lets increase the Odds by attacking twice each combatant... Result?:

- Archer Stack = 40 attack, 40 hp left (Each attack can do a max of 1 kill = 10 hp).

- Hero = Death at -10 HP.

So this is what will happen... Players will require regular troops to deal effectively with Single Target attacks, while Heroes will dominate against multitarget attacks. If you reduce the frequency of ST attacks to some particular enemies, you will encourage army variety while retaining Heroes as the dominant force. EACH factor has one and only one parameter to tweak.

The reasson is that the current game mechanics are the ones triggering the "Stack Of Doom" effect that later is tried to be "fixed" by a totally unrelated mechanic such as Leveling progression. Instead this issues should be adressed into the Tactical combat itself. How the debuffs should be addressed? Very simple... I already shown what happens with full incapacitation effects. To deal with gradual ones, a few examples (N is the number of active group members):

- Degradation of the effect. Only possible if rounding effects do not take over (ie if the magnitudes involved are big compared to the number of targets involved) but a certain reduction on stat B applied as ST on a group will result in B/N net effect.

- "Group Resistance". A ST effect will have only a 1/N chances to affect a whole group by reducing the stat B.

Obviously the "crudeness" of the solutions is linked to the "raw" distinction between Single target and All Stack... If you add a "target limit" numeric quality you would get a richer array of attacks configured to be effective against Heroes, small stacks and big stacks.

 

Try to think on what happens if you go with 2 Heroes intead of 1 on your examples and then think the outcome of particular fights if you can't reach certain thresholds (like gear requirements or particular skill on the progression tree) and you may understand the concerns of the OP.

Are you seriously making the argument that stack-of-doom should be buffed?

I understand that having multiple armies is strategically better than having only one army.  That is the reason I try to build up a second army as soon as I can so that I can do more questing/monster-killing.  That is as it should be.

You are over-thinking this.

I'm already on record supporting changes to the game that provide more XP for heroes and give more interesting selections when they level.  If you think that's what this thread is about, please read the title of the OP again.

There's a lot of angst about XP-spltting, but not much consideration that XP splitting is not the problem.  The problem is that monster-killing and questing don't give enough XP to begin with.  The problem is that the skill trees have too many redundant choices.  The more subtle and endemic problem is that leveling and other events aren't entertaining.  None of that is addressed by changing XP splitting.

The only thing that removing XP splitting would do is make the Stack of Doom a mandatory play-style.

Which is why most of the posts here sound to me like: "I want LH to be simple."  They want the game to reward them for jamming all their champs into one stack and marching around the map roflstomping.  And I have little patience for that. Stardock are pretty clearly not interested in making LH simple, even if it would result in a better Metacritic score.

Stack of Doom? You mean like 9 wizards all casting blizzard or smth? That's absurd.

You get best results by mixing troops. It doesn't make sense to bring more than 2 heroes in a group. Same as you need to mix melee and ranged, physic and magic damage and abilities that support your group in any situation, have some tankyness units to hold the line and push in, while the real damage dealers, be it melee or ranged are doing their things out of harm way.

With over 200 hours of playing in this beta so far, and countless time spent reading every thread on these forums, these three sentences may best summarise my overall experience and opinion on this subject.

I want to be able to get not just one, but multiple heroes to the upper levels of their chosen profession. As is now, even with the densest settings for events, monsters, etc., pursuing every quest available, buying and utilising quest maps, farming lairs to the point of declaring war on any AI who wanders near your farm, and finally laboriously converting mana to XP via spell, if I try using multiple 1 hero per army stacks it's just not possible. At best, I can get my sovereign to the upper 20s, with some dedication, luck and LOTS of war I may get another hero or two above level 10-15.. And this is playing on Epic speed, my typical games are at least 20+ hours.

Thus, I find myself playing an Altar Mage General sovereign, parking or soul stealing my heroes, and building my own heroes via henchmen. With the right perks and buildings, henchmen outclass all but the top tier champions, and will catch up to them quickly. Legendary Henchmen?

I don't know what the fix for it is, but it certainly seems to need fixing.

Personally, I like sliders. Anything that lets me tinker with game parameters is good to go in my book. Give us sliders for adjusting the ratios of monster xp, AI xp, and quest xp, as well as a slider for lair spawn frequency.

Or, give everyone the henchmen ability as a facton trait, spruce up the unit trait selections and build your own heroes. Champions could be available via quests, techs or some other milestones, and should be truly legendary, maybe scaled to your sovereign's level.

My two cents for the morning, now it's time for a cuppa, a pipe and a game of LH.

This has been my experience as well, with the same settings besides epic game speed.  Until this is fixed, I will support any and every way to mitigate this problem that is presented, and given that heroes are no longer the unstoppable juggernauts of FE, I feel that the xp splitting has outlived its usefulness.  It's no longer possible to have a level 5 defender with stun, adventurer's boon, and 2 points in a spell school.  Level 5 heroes in general are weak compared to a stack of leather-clad troops with clubs, and the current lack of XP to be found in the world guarantees that the majority of your heroes will remain at whatever level your recruited them.  Since the xp gain has been increased once during the beta so far, I believe that removing the XP split might have a better chance of actually happening than returning XP gains to FE levels.  I just want to have more than one high-end hero in a game without being forced to learn XML.  Why is that too much to ask?

People are focusing on the XP split mechanic because on the surface that is what's driving them to focus on one or two heroes and leave the rest at home doing nothing. People want to be able to have two champions in an army without feeling penalized for it. 

But you're right, the underlying cause of all this is that XP is just far too scarce a resource. If it was abundant and people could get all their heroes to a level they were happy with before the game ends we wouldn't be having this discussion. As someone else pointed out, it's not uncommon to win the game without a single hero making it past the low teens.

I don't want the game to be simple, what I want is for the Heroes to be much more interesting and engaging. So I'll just go on record as well that I'm all for looking at alternative solutions to this issue that don't involve changes to the XP splitting, such as increase world XP availability, reducing hero level scaling, or shortening their skill trees so there is a better match with the amount of points we actually get to spend.

The thing is, all of these can be done very easily with modding.  The game is balanced in the eyes of the developers.  For those that want a different experience (no pun intended) you'll have to open up the xml and change a few numbers, or wait for someone else to do it.

I appreciate modders, and mod friendly games. I tinker a bit myself, just can't help it. I love playing mods, a mod is what introduced me to Derek's work with FFH, and set me to wanting the kind of game that Legendary Heroes is shaping up to be. I expect there'll be some amazing mods once the beta is complete, and I look forward to playing them.

But respectfully, I can't imagine that in a game callled Legendary Heroes the developers mean for rank and file troops to be the star players, and that is the situation currently in the vanilla game, as I see it. Whether it's by adding sliders, increasing base xp, doing away with the xp split in whole or decreasing the penalty, xp producing buildings or techs, or some combination of these or other ideas, some way of creating opportunities to play with multiple high level heroes seems to be needed.

Just what difficulty are you playing? and are we even playing same game at this point? (FE or LH?) with how fame works right now there is no way you can get more than 4 heroes (if super lucky, that is) in early game, and those 4 heroes-stack is completely useless, unless supported by other 5 slots of troops.

What makes me crazy is that there is no middle-ground-balance in the whole Elemental series. In current balance, I have a feeling I am playing WoM, only to be in reversed balance (Uber strong RPG to Uber strong 4X). In full seriousness, current Fallen Enchantress is the most balanced one right now (not perfect, and I definitely see RPG elements are stronger. But it can be somewhat fixed by simply playing at higher difficulty level.)

The way Stardock balances the game -I say without reservation- is downright childish and impatient. If LH had kept all of FE's rpg elements intact, just add Fame system (in more stricted way) and trait-tree system the balance would had been near-perfect because Fame system would had effectively prevent players to build heroes-only army by limiting the number of heroes can be recruited. But oh no! Let's nerf XP, buff 4X, removing encumbrance and here we have another game where balance is on extreme side, again.

Well, I believe "very easily" and "modding" cannot be in same sentence regarding this game.