I was extremely impressed by the variety of heroes and their beautiful animated artworks, never mind the detailed bios.

But when it comes to gameplay there is almost no differences among them. Hell, same race and class will be identical (except mebbe their tier 0 starting skill). really feel this was a missed opportunity; hero skills should have been more diverse, varied, and with meaningful choices. i really like the idea of them having generic, class, and race skills. if there was greater variety in each of those three, and more meaningful unique skills, it would add a lot to the game. and probably would take a lot less work than even one of those portraits.

To be honest, your complaint doesn't really make sense to me.  The system that is used matches any other RPG that you see.  Most character's abilities in RPGs are based on Class.  Sometimes it's Race + Class. This game uses that same system.  Every hero has a Race and a Class, and that is what determines their skill tree. When you say "almost no differences among them" it makes me think you haven't looked very closely. There is LOTS of meaninful choice between what heroes to use.

Maybe one you play the game more, you'll agree with this, but it would have been hellish, if not impossible, to balance; as well as can you imagine all the inonography that would be needed for so many unique skills as you're proposing?  There are dozens of heores with dozens of skills. If they were all unique, it would also be very hard to learn the game, since players would have nothing to learn except pure memorization of ever hero in the game.  Having a Race + Class system means that players can learn how the various classes and races work in order to gain some knowledge to put that to use, strategically, when it comes to picking and purchasing heroes. 

Maybe you don't know that you can get heroes from other races than your own? Once you unlock the technology to purchase heroes, this is something that is worthwhile doing.

Perhaps the (work in progress) mod "Enhanced Space 2" by modder Kuma is more close to what you aim for. To be found in ES2 Steam workshop.

i was pretty impressed with enhanced space, and i do like much of what it does. but it has a number of bugs, especially broken trait descriptions, and tbh it just doesnt feel as polished as vanilla. to be honest, i was very surprised there was such a dearth of mods that changed heroes or even just added some new skills to choose from.

And when i say they have no personality, i mean you pretty much always build em the same way. if governer, take all system perks, if admirial the fleet ones. you get enough points to get every one of those on your heroes (so each is being built the same way even if there is some variance in the particulars) before unlocking the next tier. sometimes you even have to take a useless skill or two just to get to the next tier. but the two individual triats each hero gets could have been more meaningful, and especially should have had their own icons. because the entire skill screen, to be entirely blunt, feels very B rate. it is just a bland looking menu, with symbols that do little to convey what they mean.

yeah, it would be harder to balance heroes if they had more varied skills, but considering how few you actually have to choose from most of the time it would add a bit of an X factor imo.

on the topic of other games... most games with heroes that lead armies (homm, AoW, MoM) have heroes that look generic, or have a 'hero' standard, but fairly in depth skill systems. consider homm V. each faction's heros had two models, one male and one female.and a still portrait. but in the skills you would find both A) initial diffrences, as some heroes were better with particular troops or magic, while others had governing skills. and B) that as those heroes leveled they would become drastically different than another player's hero of the same name. contrast that to ES2, and as i noted above, every hero will be built the same way by the player depending on whether they are an admiral or governer.

about the only way to make them feel as unique as they look would be to add another set, or two, to each hero so as you leveled you had to pick and choose. perhaps one extra slice for a faction skillset, and another that is specifically governer/admiral. so yeah, a fair bit of work. but still a whole lot less than went into those amazing art pieces.

though to be entirely honest... the hero system from distant worlds woulda been even better. generating random traits based on actions (which can include negative ones) that only become revealed with familiarity, but will continue to grow over time.

that is a good reason for amplitute. but why has no mod maker made mods that add more skills and options to heroes. seems like a huge area of the game that mod makers simply dont touch that entire aspect of the game(aside from adding the occasional, and usually silly, personal hero)?

Realize the mod community is smaller than many i have seen, but that still seems like a relatively simple addition that i am sure will appeal to more than myself.

Duthos wrote:

i was pretty impressed with enhanced space, and i do like much of what it does. but it has a number of bugs, especially broken trait descriptions, and tbh it just doesnt feel as polished as vanilla.

As I still wrote, the mod is work in progress. From my experience it is a lot more polished especially when it comes to bug-fixing  compared to vanilla game. Nearly all hero traits are ready. Not sure, when you did test the mod last time. Anyway, your decision.

yesterday XD.

go into your planet resource tab, and cursor over your incomes. many of the hero bonus lack descriptions so shows an error message.

i hadnt realized just how much it noosted exploration rewards either. kinda minimized the value of many resources.

Duthos wrote:

on the topic of other games... most games with heroes that lead armies (homm, AoW, MoM) have heroes that look generic, or have a 'hero' standard, but fairly in depth skill systems. consider homm V. each faction's heros had two models, one male and one female.and a still portrait. but in the skills you would find both A) initial diffrences, as some heroes were better with particular troops or magic, while others had governing skills. and B) that as those heroes leveled they would become drastically different than another player's hero of the same name. contrast that to ES2, and as i noted above, every hero will be built the same way by the player depending on whether they are an admiral or governer.a faction skillset, and another that is specifically governer/admiral. so yeah, a fair bit of work. but still a whole lot less than went into those amazing art pieces.

Those heroes don't have more personality, they simply all take their skills from the same general skill pool.  Thus, yes, any single hero can have a much more randomized set of skills; but the total amount of variety is not greater.

However, reading you more, I don't think your issue is really with the heroes or how they gain skills.  I think your issue is with the design of skills themseves: what they do.  You are correct that skills only boil down to 2 uses: governance and fleet battles. And, for the most part, they are simply just numerical bonuses to things. Unlike HoMM where a skill could do something like give a hero an extra attack, or give them first strike or something.  But those games you are mentioning have very deep battlefield combat systems that can be utilized to craft such a large variety of spells, etc.  There is no such system in Endless Space 2.  So I'm not sure what you are really suggesting be done about this.

you may be at least partly right. i would probably be happier with em if they were dedicated as governers or admirals, with skill trees offering alernative skills that might be enough to distinguish them. mebbe with skills that did things other than just pump numbers, as you said. though i definitely think a better UI would also go a long way to making it feel more... polished.