I understand that this is kind of leftover from ES, but why an hero, which is actually, unlike in ES, a unit by it's own right, cannot travel and fight alone?



And let's think about it some more, if he could, why would he be able to be instantly reassigned from a city/army on one side of the map to the other? (Could be a Vaulter ability...)

I agree. I do however think that the a hero should not take a unit point slot in an army, as it is currently

I disagree.



Technically the issue here is the way you interpret units. You think the hero should be able to fight alone because you interpret the hero to mean 1 unit and a squad of archers for example to mean whatever the model shows (eg. 5 units) when really it's more or less a visual representation so it could be hero is 1 unit but the suqad is actually 500 archers and 1 model = 100 archers. It makes no sense then for the hero to travel alone. Who the hell would just randomly walce around the map alone?



Having the hero go alone also breaks the suspencion of disbelief on minor faction takeover and parley. "Really one dude kicked an entire faction?" Or, "Those primitives actually listened to one dude with out any indication of support on it's back?" Or, "You telling me that castles was sieged and burned to the ground by one dude?" It's just better if the hero is forced as "leader" and never a foot soldier since it explains anything that might require "multiple hands" to do regardless of the ability of any one individual.

If you want to go there... how do you know the hero is only 1 unit?

If they changed it, how would 'unassigning' the hero work? You'd have to have a unit vanish from the map.



One reason I like it the way it is, the hero respawns every 20 turns. It might not be fun if the enemy can just roam around with that hero unit, risking no units with industry has been spent on in the fight.

Why would the unit vanish? Unlike heroes, they can roam the map freely... 20 turns is a long time to have an hero unavailable if it gets killed, that unit industry cost is probably not that much in comparison.

BlueTemplar wrote:
If you want to go there... how do you know the hero is only 1 unit?

That doesn't even make any sense. They're heroes - unique characters. From a gameplay perspective, Hero units are perfectly fine currently. They are unique and shape/evolve around how you want to play, giving different buffs to your empire and/or the troops they are leading. You can do a whole lot with that one unit and if they expand on it a little more it'll be great.

BlueTemplar wrote:
Why would the unit vanish? Unlike heroes, they can roam the map freely... 20 turns is a long time to have an hero unavailable if it gets killed, that unit industry cost is probably not that much in comparison.

Let's take for example a game that does have hero units as stand-alone units that can roam the map freely - Eador: Masters of the Broken World. Quite different from Endless Legend, but still amazing in it's own right, does showcase that heroes (and allowing them to respawn) isn't that great of a gameplay mechanic. Late game it can be won by simply just re-spawning your (now) overpowered level 50 hero unit, taking out 10 stacks of knights (which is kind of awesome though) and then taking out the enemies castle and finishing the game.



Although I do think if hero units were a little stronger it'd be pretty neat. Having the option to build them into terrifying killing machines, yet having nothing to bring to their leadership abilities OR making them a great leader, but not much stronger than normal units would be interesting.

Oh, ok, I get what you meant by hero units vanishing from the map - and I already gave the answer to that : why would you even be able to unassign heroes and have them instantly travel over the map? If you want to talk realism, that makes a lot less sense to me than a hero defeating multiple squads.



My point is that heroes already ARE units in their own right, as, like in HoMM4, they directly take part in a fight and can be killed during a fight (and that is what causes the issues braww is talking about, (not the allowing heroes to travel alone thing) and gets even worse if you allow multiple heroes per army).



You could already kind of achieve almost the same thing that I'm proposing by just having the cheapest unit you can design to go with that hero and just keep the unit in the back of the fight (I wonder what happens if that unit is killed but the hero survives - he's automatically unassigned?).