Here is a suggestion for experience distribution:

If you have a high level unit stacked with a bunch of lower level units, the assumption is that the higher level unit does most of the work in winning the battle, whether actively (damage) or passively (leadership bonuses, healing, buffs)  So why not distribute the experience based on the total levels of the surviving units, or flatten the distribution a little with a constant.

e.g.  A battle is fought that yields 100 experience.  Involved were a level 8 hero, a level 5 hero, and some stacks of regulars of levels 1, 2, and 3.

 Column 4 shows the result of distributing the experience strictly by level.  The last column adds a constant (1) to the levels to even things out a bit.  Of course, giving most of the experience to the higher level units means that they will ... well ... get more experience, so the experience required to level up would need to be greater, but that has also been discussed.  Not true.  Higher level units would get better experience by using the minimum number of units.  They would do better than the lower level units, but that is what this is trying to accomplish.

An interesting idea, but the focus should be more on slowing down the hero growth as that is the main issue here.

The vision for FE is a TBS with heavy RPG elements according to the devs. You should be able to use a variety of strategies. I am a fan of leveling a few heroes and then promoting each one of those heroes to leaders of their own armies, as the game progresses. The heroes from the early game have done more and so have more experience. You can find new heroes with varied amounts of experience as well. Armies can be upgraded so that the ones you start with are useful throughout the game (one of the best things they have done IMHO). XP is experience. Taking on an ogre by oneself is much more difficult and should reflect that when XP is given out. It works from a logical standpoint and is a good way to give variety to players. A good strategy game forces the player to make choices based on the situation. A small band of powerful heroes and one omega powerful Sov should both be viable strategies that are reasonable balanced. So, if you don't find any heroes at the start, you can have the option to try to make a godlike Sov to compensate and stay in the game.

As to level caps, I would like to explore other options before a cap is tried. I think that percent bonuses to XP would be a good trait to unlock form the hero section of the Magic Tree. There should also be one per faction improvements as well as world wonders that give players that choose a herocentric strategy. Caps are restrictive by definition. I hope the devs explore incentives and use caps as a last resort.

I could be completely wrong though. We would need to test new mechanics before anyone can say one way or another. As rillifane has a solution in competition with mine, I wish him good luck in persuading the devs to try out his idea. 

Here's my follow-up questions to this exercise, because I think it's a good one.

Do you want leveling to progress at approximately the same pace across all levels?

Should low level units gain levels faster, or higher level units?

How would xp-to-next-level be calculated?

I don't think anything drastic should be done to heroes until the really obvious balance issues are addressed. Removing a handful of problem issues will pare their power down greatly, and if that is done on top of other nerfs, they'll be too weak.

I am guessing some of this is moot until +1/level is nerfed and the same to Path of [Class Here]. Nice to see some passionate posters though! 

The sooner we start talking about these things, the more ideas the devs have to put on their whiteboards at Stardock Central. 

That's what these forums are all about.

And, Frogboy just confirmed that everyone that purchased the game prior to Nov 1, 2010 will be in the beta on Thursday!  Woo-hoo!

This is kind of a side issue to hero level speed, I agree, but it does address using high level units to power level others.  Especially if the experience is doled out to every participant as it does now.  Having the maximum number of units in a battle effectively multiplies the net experience gained.  This is the opposite of the desired effect in my opinion.  Experience is a reward for risk.  More units = less individual risk, not more.

Distributing experience by levels could potentially accelerate level gain of the higher level units if there is not an appropriate increase in the experience per level (which there should be).  No it wouldn't.  Dragging other non-combatants along to level them would slow your leveling, because you would get a smaller piece of the experience pie.  Mmmmmmm pie 

My answer to the question would be: No, units should not level at the same rate across all levels.  It should take longer the higher you get (thus effectively producing a VERY soft, natural level cap), but that is a matter of exp\level, not exp distribution.  The two need to be considered together because if one is off, it will throw the other off one way or the other.  The current flat distribution heavily favors low level units and makes power leveling possible, which I consider bad.  The multiplication of experience across all units makes crafting a reasonable level gain curve even more difficult.  I would suggest arriving at an acceptable exp distribution that will prevent power leveling, then tune the per level experience cost to achieve an acceptable rate of leveling.

Howdy,

Just wanted to chime in here with my agreement to the power of heroes early in the first 100 turns.  I can take 2 and a small army in leather (2-3 small groups of spear-men) and steam roll pretty much whatever I want.  If I cant steam roll the mobs I take some smaller huts and get some totally awesome magic gear and steam roll the rest of what ever I come against.  I wanted to add a main point here; because of what I just described above I don't use tactical battles i just auto finish all the battle knowing I'm going to win and if a hero dies he is really not dead just hurt for 1 turn.  If my sov dies i just wait and do it all over again with maybe a couple of extra units.  Its not a challenge after about turn 150 anymore and im simply running around and killing, I don't even build anything any longer.   Food for thought.

Thanks,

it isn't levels.  It's too easy to get gear.  Buy it in a town,   or go raid the random spawn unprotected huts.   I'm going to continue to compare to mom, because it worked there.  So here it is.

In mom,  you didn't get very good gear from anything you didn't have to fight for.  your  one lone hero couldn't solo a goodie hut  that had more than mana crystals or gold.  You had to build up troops for him to take to the goodie hut to get an artifact.   here we have many more artifact slots.   In mom you had 3. you couldn't just keep adding up all the crappy artifacts to eventually make you godlike.   You had to chose weather this item was better than what it would replace.  As was stated, even with mundane weapons our heroes are too powerful too early.   For the combat formula,  strength is far too easy to come by on skills & gear for heroes.   It should not be an option on gear, and the number of skills offering it should be limited.  The 1 strength per level skill should be 2 picks instead of 1.

You make a good point.

MqPiffle states a rule I find myself agreeing with. The total basic amount of xp, a specific encounter yields, should be constant.

That means the model I proposed on page 3 isn't viable. Luckily DexCiscos model is sound and would yield the results I was aiming for - linking xp to risk taken. DexCiscos model would make me use low-level heroes to hunt darklings, and high-level heroes to hunt dragons, instead of just having a single stack of doom, where you have spectators earning xp.

Just splitting xp evenly would be a good start, but in my opinion, it would still favor the stack of doom strategy to heavily.

Besides the xp issue there are two other really big issues that needs fixing regarding heroes.

1) They break the economy. In my last game (Military victory on a small balanced map on normal difficulty in 24 years) I put the tax rate at zero in turn 1 and I never raised it, nor did I miss having gildars at any point in the game. It should not be possible to run a loot driven economy. At most, weapons and artifacts should be sellable for minimal amounts of gildars (or iron, or mana or crystals), i'm thinking 1 to 5 units pr. item at most, unless the item was specifically meant as a monetary reward (stuff like wolf pelts and spider eggs).

2) There is only one viable strategy for how to utilize your heroes, send them adventuring. Different strategies should be viable, hence there should be incentives for keeping your heroes in your cities. This issue is of course linked with the problem, that your cities aren't in any real danger from monsters. However, I personally also think that heroes should be able to contribute to your nation building when stationed in cities, to a much larger degree (a mage could add research when stationed in a city, a warrior could add xp to trained units, a defender could add xp to garrison units etc). 

I agree with this completely.

I think the devs really need to add alot more items to the game almost in the style of diablo. Atm early and easy quests are giving away all the good stuff when I would be perfectly happy finding say a wooden stick with slightly better stats than the standard one in the early levels. A diablo style slight randomization seems like it would be easy to implement and allow for some usefull and interesting hero rewards at low levels that won't be over powered.

What if a hero could only hit 1 member of a stack until he built up some skill or weapon that allows him to hit multiple. this would make building troops more important as they would be able to hit multiples in a stack since THEY Have multiple in their stack. Ive noticed most npc only stack up 3 mabey 4 for wolves so mabey a pasive skill say FOLLOWTHROUGH I , II , III . Untill you build up that skill your hero would be less eficient mowing down the rifraf. OR make each stack get bonus dodge checks = to howmany in the stack and cut off the damage at the last dodge so say a stack of 3 5 hp each and 3rd guy dodge then only 10 damage. this would make bringing multy stacks more valuable and make  a hero alow down on lucky or dextrus oponents. 

did anyone actually try higher diff settings?

it seems slightly better i fought a irane very strong

in the final battle for the capital she had 250 hp!!!

very fucking hard to take down, she also came with many spellcasts buffs mainly and had a party of 6 heroes

i had 4 very strong myself with the sovereign being epic

they all had quite a high defense and i was doing not so much dmg and also she was dodging everything, the fight was quite long and basically i won only cause my sovereign was totally immortal

after i took her army+ heroes i was left with only sovereign and a dying hero myself but like i said my sovereign was as tough as her but having quite more dmg (even though she had 2x my hp)

she was only lvl 10 also

so id say ai isnt that far from a decent management  (unless all those levels were cheated )

1. Today? its been like that since day 1 of WoM

2. What do you mean early game, melee heroes / sov rule from beginning to end.

If heroes are getting out of hand, why not buffing the regular units ? More perk to choose from, some buildings that would allow you to give them more then 3 perks. Magical perks if you built the right building.

Because regular units aren't terribly weak, they're just badly overshadowed due to a handful of issues that make heroes ridiculously good at everything, plus aoe magic spells dealing multiplied damage to multi-figure units.

End result is heroes are good against heroes, monsters, and units.

They're nerfing a few things .76, I'm waiting to see how that changes the game before posting some more suggestions.

Post deleted.

because regular units are not so weak, they are good, just too much easy to freefarm with heroes lead to very powerful early mid heroes while to get as good units you need a ton of research

also i find research quite slow, even with 4 5 cities to get the highest tier of research takes really too long, basically it take the time your hero party can kill the whole world:D

thats another problem

heroes are self sufficient while army need research and resources

and most of all like i told 20 times they are immortal, so cant really have a so strong unit with high reward in playstyle and no risk at all

Well hopefully the balance pass we're getting today will alleviate some of these issues.