Priestess starting spells are really good, but her skill tree isn't as good as the other classes.  However, divine vision is good for occasionally reducing doomsday.  Shard healing is good when it's good.  Ultimately, she's not necessarily a better healer than the wizard, but early game she is the best healer.

I agree the default champions are confusing, but they actually have some synergies with their default sovereign.  For example, in the case of Tandis, the wizard's movement and mentoring skill upgrades go well with him.  Additionally, some spells are excellent for a solo warrior champion.  While Keplin is more like the wizard, he would make Galor more challenging for me to play in the beginning, since Galor doesn't come with zero cost spells to spam with.  Tandis at least cut down on mana costs in the early game.  I find Tandis's acrobat ability incredibly useful for keeping him alive against Fallen apprentices even on insane, something that Keplin's invulnerability does not protect against.  Tandis is also better for trash mobs, saving mana for the big and decisive battles.

Tandis fits better with the Relias image seeing how Galor is the son of Relias, although Tandis actually comes from Tarth.  Perhaps Galor feels sorry for him. In any case, I see this a lot like how Merlin is King Arthur's mentor and protector rather than an apprenticeship of magic.  Also reminds me of Ganadalf.  Galor is basically the white wizard stereotype.

Currently, I struggle the most with the Tinkerer, unless I go for a super army with killer enchantments.

Commander is the easiest for me to play.  This is thanks to the hidden bonus of three additional armies plus immediately upgrading to leadership I.  The huge 25% xp bonus per shard is outrageous overpowered in my opinion, even on few shards option.  The commander is both front-loaded and end-loaded.  In other words, he has strong skills throughout the skill tree.

Tyrant could use a (expensive?) skill to increase how much doom you can have before game over.  Just cut off the bonuses at the 500 doom limit, 450 or 400 if overpowered.

If sovereigns feel too similar it cause many of the skill upgrades are stat upgrades rather than provide new game play mechanics or new units like you said.  They feel different enough for me, but I understand the concern.  I always go for the sentinel unit as part of my rush or early development strategy.

There're a lot more to go into but these are what come to mind at the moment.

I just noticed Priestess's holy vindication encourages you to use the largest army possible yet like Grakor said, the priestess has the smallest army size.  I got some uses out of holy vindication during early game on insane mode.  It certainly not as a good of spell on insane mode, because enemies have a lot health points.  It's more useful on normal and easy difficult.

Into the light is good for free mana in easy battles when you can damage enemies enough so into the light will deliver the killing blow.  Kelpin's more casting per battle helps here.

In the case of taking wizard's superior clairvoyance upgrades early on, raise skeleton is very useful for the 1 mana cost.

In general, some skill upgrades are clearly better than other.  Who takes the indoctrinate skill for Krognar the tyrant for +1 favor for all minor races?  It would be better if it give you a second chance to ally with races lost to Sorcerer King but that's too good.  I rather have -1 to Sorcerer King's favor on the minor races.

And the tinkerer doesn't get the bonus crafting components when he takes certain skills.

Completely agree with the obsolete issue.  The problem I have with the Commander, and SK in general is that you get too many meatbags from quest that you discard to city storage once a better meatbag can take their place in your active stacks.

Another issue is how SK simply recycle the resources from FE.  In this particular case, it is the unit size (# of people making up a unit).  The fired swimming instructor is only a single person unit, trained units have 3 people, and the rare units you find have 4.  Their scaling is completely different and has huge impact on their stats and usefulness later on.

My suggestion:

Rather then giving us these randomly named meatbags with customized stats, can we get them as volunteers (you can them re-purpose them as soldiers) or scholars (can re-purpose them as admin, logistic support, etc.)  For volunteers, if you don't want them to be so generic, then give each of them a random +1 bonus stat (e.g. +1 heal, +1 crit, +2 def, +2 atk).  The player can use these volunteers to form their own unit (by combining up to 4 volunteers, or 6 for commander into 1 unit, just like how army size work in FE).  The individual volunteer's bonus would then be added as a unit bonus.  You would then make use of the crafting system to craft the require gears to start them off (e.g. bows for archers).

The 2nd issue is trained troops from city with high essence count, and assuming you have all 3 aura spells, their stats would quite surpass everything else.  The fix for this would be to have the unit you formed to go to these cities to acquire a (permanent) training buff, broken down by tier to help augment the stats. This should address the obsolete issue, and the training tier scales based on your leader's progression.

Don't know how difficult it would be to make this level of change, so might need to shelf this for SK2.

Hey Blade,

  I just replied to your post over on the steam forum (literally) and figured I would point you to my mod's I've made which fix at least some of the tinkerer issues.  I'm working on redoing the entire recipe and loot soon to have it make more sense, but it's a pain!

  I agree with a lot of what you've said concerning enchantment.  I know from someone whose trying to help out by modding stuff on my own, it's a pain because the files are bloated with stuff that's not used.

  Specifically on your comment about converting "Tier 1" materials into better materials, that is a fantastic idea.  Got 20 cloudy diamonds, convert them to maybe 4 Radiant Diamonds.  I'll include that in my to-do list.

Could also, instead of tying enchants to materials, leave materials for the items themselves, and tie enchants to spellbooks.  Because right now, I've found that the best way to handle Tinker or Commander is to customize them to /8/ enchantment books, and no others.

So instead, say you want to be able to put +2 physical damage in a slot.  Well, that's the kind of thing that sounds like bigger muscles, so we're looking at the Enchantment school.  But you want +5 lightning (like an Onyx Ring does)?  Well, that's obviously Wrath.  Healing effects, and mana-gain?  Well, all the specialists for that in previous Elemental games are Summoners, and in D&D you use Conjuration to draw the energy from a god to heal with, so it fits that Summoning would be needed for regeneration effects.  Yet Chaos is where the weird, nasty stuff shows up, so that's where you'd probabably get the 'on kill' effects from.  And if you want Flame Wave on Death, you may need Chaos 4, Wrath 4, completely cutting you off from a host of other kinds of enchantments.

So you'd have 'Wrath I' books, kinda like now, but it wouldn't just be 1 use, it'd be limited only by your mana supplies.  The Tinkerer would have advantages in being able to easily get the recipies and mats to make any base item he wants.  Wizard would have advantages with mana availabilty to use to enchant items, though the tinker could still push them farther once he had the juice available (or enough mana pots).  And let each sov have an enchant type all their own.

Like the Priestess, no matter her books, could always apply +1 tactical regen, as a divine blessing upon the item.  Tyrant could always apply +1 mana on killshot.  Tinker could further his crafting advantage with a 1 random crafting mat on killshot.  Guardian could grant +1 defense as an option.  Commander could always have +1 move available.  Wizard could always have +1 elemental damage.

That way, no matter what spellbooks, they always have thematic enchantments available to them once they can enchant.