I've been enjoying the Drakken lately, but I was very disappointed in how weak their race specific hero tree is. They seem to have no overall goal like many of the other faction heroes do (science, trade, food, ect). As a result, I cannot see any reason to bother getting more of this hero. Here are my opinions on each perk.



Irrigation Expert - This is not bad, and can help early cities to grow. But river requirement perks are incredibly situational, and since there are no other food granting abilities, most players will ignore this and just buy the Necrophage hero.

Raptor's Eye - Flying units, especially the Wyverns, are great for their high movement and scouting. Because of this, they will rarely ever have a hero attached to them. This perk would only be good if the hero itself was flying.

Narritive Master - This is a great perk and really works well with the Drakken. I think the last point of it should be a percentage bonus, though, to make it useful late game.

Friendly Banner - This is fine, but perhaps would be better earlier in the tree. The real problem is that this does not link to Inspirational Leader, making Cold Operator very difficult to get as the Drakken. The Drakken are the only faction with this problem.

Battlesaur - Average perk. Good to get if you don't need anything else.

Cultural Ambassador - This is not a great mid and end game ability, either. Many cities will already be happy or better by the time this is useful. It could perhaps be useful for new conquered cities.

TL;DR drakken heroes are bad as governors because they have mediocre skills and bad pathing.



edit: Also bad at generals. Because no winter army.

I've generally felt that Drakken heroes make the weakest governors, for much the same reasons that you list (few governor skills and none of them good for small cities; their starting skill is extremely terrain-dependent; the happiness skill is hard to get before it becomes irrelevant due to luxury resources; none of their skills are stand-out impressive; they don't link to Inspirational Leader or Cold Operator). Their increased XP gain rate is nice, but I don't think it makes up for these flaws (particularly considering they can only invest 6 skill points before they run out of good options, making large amounts of XP less useful for them than for other factions' governors).



However, I'll note that Necrophage heroes (IIRC) are also lacking a link to Inspirational Leader--they can get Cold Operator directly from their faction tree, but Inspirational Leader is itself a nice governor skill, especially for factions with fewer governor skills to invest points into.



Also, note that Cultural Ambassador is not particularly good for newly-conquered cities--ownership is a multiplier on your happiness, not a subtraction, so it reduces the effect of happiness bonuses (and at 0% ownership, you will always have 0 happiness, no matter how many bonuses you get). The Roving Clans hero skill that causes your ownership to recover faster is easily a better choice for transitional cities (and the second level improves the happiness of all your cities).

Yes Drakken hero is by far the worst governor. But this is not the only problem with heroes. I think hero skill trees need a major overhaul. Most of the time there is only one optimal path and it's not much of a choice at all. This makes heroes of same race/class too similar.



I propose to make skills more like a web with many connections between skills. This way there would be actual choices and multiple paths when leveling a hero.



Also why not make it a circle so that race and class skills could also have connections?

- Tanel, I agree with you : hero skill system is too simple and does not propose true choices. But changing it would need some conception and some work for the devs, then work on the A.I. and the balance.



- If we could have their feedback about what they plan to do, where they would like propositions, where not etc. it would be really good for us.

I also agree that the hero skills are rather boring and really one-dimensional (well, you get to choose whether they're an army or city leader).



But since you have the choice of all the different races, it's usually clear what you want for each role... and Drakken heroes are one of the best, if not the best, army heroes. Healing is *huge* until very late in the game. Then it's just really, really nice. So I'm not particularly sad at seeing them not be the best city hero. Though it does go against their lore a bit.



Cult leaders are by far the best in cities, except for a few extremely specialized cities. It does make sense, as the Cult only gets one city, and they need really good rulers. But since everyone else can take them as well, it makes for pretty dull heroes overall. For basically every race, I always end up with 1 Ardent Mage hero for a specialized research town, 1 Broken Lords hero for a specialized dust town, then all my other towns have Cult heroes. There's just no compelling reason to change that.