The whole idea is hindering the rate at which heroes skyrocket and blow away the map. Mabye you will have to use regular units to supliment your hero army? Maybe the game will be reprogrammed to not take 18 billion years to research stuff and you can upgrade your heroes that way?

In any case this idea has merit, and -if- you can make your single or dual party champions win battles and gain xp you should be rewarded for doing so. Having xp gains the same for every unit in the army is silly, and as numerous playtests have shown, is severely broken.

I have already presented an idea that hinders hero growth rate while at the same time not ruining the flow of the game as sharing xp does. This idea does not reward you for single or dual champions all it does is punish you. Even with the idea of supplimenting with regular units this idea still punishes you because they take a share of the xp as well. Then theres the fact that if something is punishing the player the ai is screwed over exponentially more...

An idea for how hero defeat should work.

What about a system like mount and blade where defeated heroes result in one of three outcomes

1) The hero was just knocked out. They will need to recover but there is no status impairment.

2) The hero was injured. Here you would have the various staus effects already seen in the beta as it is.

3) The hero is killed.

A new party stat could be added which alters the percentage chance of these outcomes, this would make for some interesting buffs for the life spell book plus you could perhaps have some building related improvements like a surgery making heroes less likely to die/become injured when in friendly influence.

Would also be cool if heroes could be taken prisoner by the enemy factions, if your party is beaten then there could be a system added where the enemy party would capture and use your hero to fight for them, could be a mind control spell thats lasts so many seasons until it breaks. The spell should lower the heroes stats and you could have them still attack their captors now and then (like the clumsy trait, representing the hero trying to overcome the mind control).

TLDR: Give hero defeat some randomness and tie it in with interesting choices for the player.

I love the idea of being able to capture enemy heroes, or having my own captured, and then either ransom them or hold them in my army until I can drop them off at a city based prison. Maybe a low chance when defeating an enemy party with heroes, modified by a hero/unit trait line called Manhunter or something. I guess you could execute prisoners too, but that may be a bit much.

I agree with anyone that has said that heroes should die sometimes to be rezz'd with some generic spell at a mana cost related to the level of the hero. Maybe two separate spells in life/death for thematic reasons, with life's being more expensive mana wise, but death's being a city-targeted Rez that eats population in addition to its mana cost

I don't see where the punishment comes into play.  What it does is allow a choice for the player (or AI): Do I take a risk and try to go after that mob with my one hero to gain more xp, or do I assemble a party and / or army to DEFINITELY kill the mob, but SHARE the experience.  In no other game that I know of does XP become POTENTIALLY INFINITE while piling on party members in an invading force. 

Right now it's a broken mechanic and most definitely a bug.  You actually WANT to have more party members; there's no incentive to take risks.  It's very bland, and game-breaking.

I assume that a unit (hero) needs to gain progressively more  xp to gain further levels.  If that's true, you just split the xp evenly.  None of the "who hit more", "who did the most damage", "who killed what" sort of thing...that kind of stuff just ruins tactics. 

You, as a player, decided to bring X troops along, so if you win, the xp gets divided X ways, with any members that fell in combat not receiving their share of the xp (but that xp still gets split out of the whole.)

+1 on possibility of hero death.  Negative traits for falling in combat are great, but so far they don't fall very often for me  and the possibility of permanently losing a hero makes them more precious and makes the player give more thought to their odds of survival in each fight.

What if we limited the number of heroes per group?  Treat them like generals possibly?  One hero per party for every three party slots so three heroes to a party at max tech???

i like the one hero per party in general but it would be very hard to manage it

what if 3 heroes are stationed in a city that get attacked?

seems too much complicated

It is difficult to argue this point against someone that not only hasn't played the beta but apparently hasn't played WOM either... The thing is, you need your units to be able to be leveled in groups. Leveling them basically one at a time isn't merely tedious but quite simply changes the entire flow of the game and not for the better. 

Also as a side note, anything the developers intentionally put into a game is not a bug...

IMO: Tweaking the rate the heroes level and the traits they have available to them should be done first before implementing more major mechanics such as limiting the # of heroes per army stack or changing what happens if they die.

It is my speculation that the xp gain as it currently stands is not what they intended, and thus they didn't realize that it was broken.

EDIT: And, fyi, I don't appreciate the more personal tone your posts are taking.  I'm only trying to argue a concept, not criticize you as a person.

I cannot see a good reason, either as a game mechanic or logical concept, to let every unit in a battle get the amount of XP that is currently doled out. Saying that it should be split between all members, because is a better way to handle XP is an observation of fact. I am sure this has been talked about internally or is at least on the list of issues. It is a glaring problem. 

I am a little worried that Frogboy said something about +1/level being the problem with heroes getting too strong. It is clearly a combination of both. One hero powerhouses should be a strategy, say for Umber, that is well balanced with many heroes, some heroes some regulars, all regulars, etc... 

It is difficult for me to reply to this without being out right offensive as in believing I have singled you out simply because I don't like you and not because you are arguing a point that I am against has offended me.

But if my wording rubs you the wrong way so to speak allow me to try and explain what I meant. The problem I have with what you are saying beyond that I think it is a bad idea is that you have no apparent person experience or evidence to support what you are saying. In fact it seems your only support for your claims is exaggerating. That is what makes it difficult to argue because you don't so much give examples of how things do work but how you think they work and how your idea would affect that. Basically what I'm saying is due to experience we are on two completely different pages and there is simply no way for us to line up our experiences without you being in the beta.

As for the bug comment I study game design and too many people throw that word around without considering its meaning that was not directed completely at you.

Your arguement for sharing xp makes even less sense. Unless I am completely off the mark with what you are saying, what I read is basically that if more people work to solve a problem the less they should understand after they have solved it. How is this more logical?

the other option would be to only get what you earn, that is to say a unit gains XP in relation to the damage it dealt to the monster, with a special bonus for the unit that dealt the killing blow, that way the units that spent the whole battle doing nothing get no XP or a very low amount of XP (basically a flat value representing being in the battle)

Please god no. Being forced to send my 5 attack power zero armored mage in to inflict 3 points of damage so that he can get enough experience to rank up to disciple (to use damage spells) is tedious, risky, and without a comparitive element of fun. I would then have to spend mana to level this guy up in the future? Not to mention this would be a programming nightmare (or at least require a whole new stream of code).

@rillifane I do not understand where the penalties are in splitting experience. Sure it might make you feel butt hurt to lose out on hero xp because you needed a couple spearmen to tag along and 'steal' their xp so they could level, but currently there is no reason not to simply stack all the best units together (except for movespeed) making this a 'no-brainer' decision in a 'strategy' game.

If the issue later becomes that champions/units do not gain xp quickly enough those specifc monsters can be reworked to provide more. Splitting the experience is a solid trade-off for guarenteeing the fight with your 'stack o doom'. As a side note though, I agree that this is very unlikely to be a bug, and was an intentional decision. With the consequences of said decision being clear, I believe a change is in order.

Thats not the main reason. This perks are good but heroes are godlike completly without it. Just sell all the early found common stuff you don't need to shop and buy every available hero and you have 4+ hero army which steamroll most of stuff and level up fast.

Even 1 Hero is enough to get this run!

You find epic items all around and some of the makes heroes so insane + fast level up.

I have high level heroes 5+ uncommon/epic items and still not even spearman

+1 on possibility of hero death.  Negative traits for falling in combat are great, but so far they don't fall very often for me  and the possibility of permanently losing a hero makes them more precious and makes the player give more thought to their odds of survival in each fight.

+2

I understand how you feel.  But do I really need to start off my post by saying "I've been gaming for 40 years and..." for you to understand that what I say could possibly have some merit?  I may be bold, blunt, and crass in my 'tone', but I'm telling you, in all of my vast RPG gaming experience I have never once come across a situation where an encounter did not have a pre-defined amount of XP to dole out at the conclusion, to be mutually shared by all of the winning combatants.  If a hero then has a 10% xp bonus after the split, that's fine, but there should definitely be a finite number of base xp gained at the conclusion of the battle.  This promotes the idea of risk and hardship, instead of the "throwing in the kitchen sink" type dilemma the game is now founded on.

You may not feel the same way and that's fine with me.  But I'm telling you the system as it is now is flawed and lacks merit, and I believe it to be a mistake on the part of the developers.

If it is also that way in WoM then I missed it, most likely because I was so busy digging through the XML to try to tweak the other issues with the game that I failed to observe it.

It was like that in WoM and it made the leveling very unbalanced. The difference there was that leveling didn't matter that much so most people could overlook it. In FE leveling is one of the most important parts of the game and I believe should include some strategic decisions:

Who do you want to level?

Do you want to risk losing a fight to level a unit very fast?

What is the smallest force you can send and still win that battle?

Don't you think having that many heroes in one army is overkill?

Can that Blade (Cross-Class between Assassin and Mage) attack that army, kill the leader and then cast Escape before dying?

Do you want to send out an army of regulars to get some levels before you need them for defense?

I beleive this may be the core of our disagreement. The problem is, this is not an rpg, this is a strategy game. The reason I feel I need to point this out is because while they may both have a couple similar elements they are in fact completely different systems. Perhaps the main difference being that in an rpg it focuses on the few and you can get by with slightly less than the recommended group size as it is generally made up for the few getting more out of it. In strategy games it is about the many and the idea of splitting xp among so many really hurts the balance of the game as suddenly any unit that stands out can lord over the rest as they struggle to get xp themselves. Basically what this does is makes it so that units that are developed outside of your initial vanguard (as in built mid to late game) wont be able to compete with units already established because the weaker enemies that they would farm xp from would already be killed off and then they would also have to somehow be able to defeat the already established armies of your enemies. This is not acceptable. Your begining army should not be the only useful units you can get. This is the problem with such a broad reaching "fix" instead of the one I suggested which went straight for the heart of the matter. 

In short split xp doesn't fix the problem, it only enhances it.

Incorrect.

Correct.

Maybe you can clarify this section for me.

Incorrect.  As you research technologies, you can build better mid - late game units and upgrade outdated units, and recruit higher level champions.  I know that the system is a little out of whack as the game stands, but when the system is balanced a little better with itself the two ought to line up more organically.

I was trying not to comment on your proposed system fix because I hate caps with a passion, but since I haven't taken the opportunity thus far, let me proceed.

Caps of any sort dumb down the game immensely, because it means I have to play the same exact way every time.  In your case, I level my heroes as quickly as possible to the 'soft-cap', rush the tech I need to open the leveling to the next 'soft-cap', rinse and repeat. Booooooooring.

Maybe I want a singular hero who becomes powerful fairly early.  Maybe I don't want to deal with heroes at all, and want to focus on civ-building and armies.  Your proposed system, and all capping systems, are invasive, ill-construed, heavy-handed, duct-tape-ish, jery-rigging, Neanderthalistic and insult my very meager intelligence.   

FE is not going to be built to be a multi-player experience, and as such does not need to be 'balanced' among players per se, which is what caps heavy-handedly try to accomplish.

well there goes any notion of civil discussion...

And I thought I was being rather nice...