This is a rant topic inspired by the opening statement of Caotico09's post regarding multiple copies of the same hero in the same game, which led me to think about how the whole system could be improved and expanded. I'll share my ideas below, and would appreciate feedback and more suggestions from the community.



To be honest, aside from the bonus they provide to armies and cities, "heroes" as they are now have very little importance and provide no immersion whatsoever. Aside from that one BL hero you get from a side quest, they are merely mercenaries you buy with Dust - their names and their bio are irrelevant. Add to that the fact that they cannot die, and the player becomes as attached to them as to "random cannon-fodder X".



How about more quest-related heroes and hero-related quests?

How about perma-death for heroes upon defeat? (Last Stand is fine and dandy, but being sent to the Academy to lick their wounds after getting wiped is a bit 'meh')

How about heroes that spontaneously offer their services to the player who has the highest [insertappropriatefieldhere] score at a given time?

How about using the current system as actual, bought-and-paid-for mercenaries that, with a little expansion of the Diplomacy / Espionnage system, could be bribed or even turned by other Factions?

For that matter, since the current system treats heroes as commodities, how about trading them? If players can already trade Techs and cities, why not troops and heroes?

Finally, how about "promoting" those units who reach the max amount of EXP at level 10 into heroes, kinda like a pawn in chess can get promoted when reaching the other side of the board? A regular unit who survives that long deserves a little something don't you think? It doesn't have to be OP, either - like, only one unit per unit type can be promoted, it would costs as much Dust as if the player were hiring, the unit would keep its stuff but start its hero carreer back at level 1, etc.



The current system is a nice thing to have, but I think it deserves to become a real thing - significant, immersive, in line with the game's lore and mechanics.

What does the rest of the community think? Feel free to share your ideas.

I agree with you that it would be awesome to have expanded heroes.

How about more quest-related heroes and hero-related quests?

How about perma-death for heroes upon defeat?

Finally, how about "promoting" those units who reach the max amount of EXP at level 10 into heroes, kinda like a pawn in chess can get promoted when reaching the other side of the board? A regular unit who survives that long deserves a little something don't you think? It doesn't have to be OP, either - like, only one unit per unit type can be promoted, it would costs as much Dust as if the player were hiring, the unit would keep its stuff but start its hero carreer back at level 1, etc.

These three ideas are interesting. I think the first one is a must. Perma-death would definitely shake up how you use heros, especially in cities. Wonder if even having them come back with reduces stats would work. The promoting lvl 10 units sounds awesome in theory. Would be cool to see how it would work.

For that matter, since the current system treats heroes as commodities, how about trading them?

Not a huge fan of this but i could see it working. Simply put, the selection of heros is so small anyway that i dont see the need to trade them. But the ability to trade units would definitely spice things up.





In my opinion they need to be more then just a random unit that you use to 'buff' your other units/cities by raising their stats.

This could be done by including them in the aforementioned quests, having them have influence on other aspects of gameplay, or have them have more unique powers.



Just thinking out loud on some hero ideas. All of these would be heros that you would get through something other then the marketplace, or to unlock special abilities you would have to do something special. (some of these might be OP, but if all heroes are different it would balance out some)

- Having 'Hero 1' reduces cost of all diplomatic transactions (but you can only get him by some difficult diplomacy related quest).

- Having 'Hero 2' give all melee units in his stack a specific ability like sweep-strikeback 3 (but hero only gets that ability by killing 'x' number of units or something).

- Having 'Hero 3' be able to become a privateer hero and switch back later.

- Having specific heros makes specific AI factions friendlier/more aggressive (you have the great tree hero of Wild Walkers.. what do you know, all the Wild Walkers factions love you).

etc... ill add more as i think of them.

Promotion might be a problem, at least with the way the game works now.



If you replace units with heroes, you gut your strongest army, which might change from 8 units and a hero to 7 units and two heroes-- and maybe, not with the best timing.



If you don't replace the unit, you get a huge glut of heroes at the end game because so many of your units are going to hit level 10 around the same time.



Even though you'd get a bunch of heroes in a short period of time, they might not be particularly useful heroes if they were just at level 1. By the time you have level 10 units, there's not a lot of time left to level up heroes.



The only way I could see it working is with optional promotion. It would work with something like the Civ V system, where you choose level-up perks for units (promotion would be a good, competitive perk), but in EL, it wouldn't work as well.



Presumably, you'd be given heroes of the same faction as the unit-- which is a bit of balance problem, since not all heroes are created equally, and especially, not all factions' heroes are useful at low levels.

I've made a thread about this previously (here), but I'd really appreciate having some variation in the types of heroes each faction has access to. I'm the sort of boring phlebian who likes to have all my units and heroes come from the same faction, but if I want a melée hero for my Vaulter army, I'm all out of luck. So having some more hero classes to each race would be kind of sweet.



C'mon Amplitude, you've got it on the Feedback thread, give it to us already! Or at least during the first half of 2015!

Buzzkillington1990 wrote:
I've made a thread about this previously (here), but I'd really appreciate having some variation in the types of heroes each faction has access to. I'm the sort of boring phlebian who likes to have all my units and heroes come from the same faction, but if I want a melée hero for my Vaulter army, I'm all out of luck. So having some more hero classes to each race would be kind of sweet.

Thanks for pointing out the existing thread, Buzz. I see I wasn't the only one who thought heroes should reflect the unit types of their faction

natev wrote:
Promotion might be a problem, at least with the way the game works now.

A promotion-like system is just one idea to introduce diversified hero types in a plausible narrative, e.g. "exceptional individuals rise up from the rank-and-file of your armies as generals / governors, to lead their troops / manage their cities". If it can't be implemented, so be it; it doesn't invalidate the fact that more hero types would be, for lack of a better word, cool.

natev wrote:
If you don't replace the unit, you get a huge glut of heroes at the end game because so many of your units are going to hit level 10 around the same time.

Indeed. A massive amount of heroes kinda goes against my initial observation that the current system gives them absolutely no depth nor character - this wouldn't be improved by mass-producing heroes. Which is why I suggested to limit it to "one unit per unit type": e.g. in the case of the Vaulters, that would be one Ranged hero (evolved from Marines), one Cavalry hero (evolved from Dawn Officers), and one Infantry hero (evolved from Titans).

You would end up with three unique and distinct heroes per major faction. Since one already exists for each, Amplitude would "only" need to design two additional models per faction. The skill trees already exist for each unit type, so there's that as well. It's a bit of design work, some writing to flesh out the bio and flavour texts, and the rest is mixing and matching existing assets. If I put my Project Manager cap on and eyeball it very roughly, I don't see any downside to doing it (granted I'm not privy to the inner workings of Amp) - more variety has been requested by the community, it has been sitting in the roadmap for the last 6 months or so, it won't be too expensive to implement, and it shouldn't take any staff working on AI or game mechanics away from their work. It's pretty a textbook Quick Win if I ever saw one.

natev wrote:
The only way I could see it working is with optional promotion.

I totally agree, it would definitely need to be optional.

natev wrote:
Presumably, you'd be given heroes of the same faction as the unit-- which is a bit of balance problem, since not all heroes are created equally, and especially, not all factions' heroes are useful at low levels.

Well, I'm not saying heroes don't need more work in other areas, such as the skill tree and general balance

- To be short, I think Endless Legend could largely inspire himself to Heroes of Might and Magic to improve the hero system. Heroes 4 is I think especialy adapted for Endless Legend because they fight on the battlefield.



- It would not be hard I think, to just pump some mechanisms what Heroes 4 use and some skills (with less luck then Heroes 4 in the skill choice selection, but more decision off the player).



- If they want do something like that, proposing ideas would not be very usefull.