Ambassador Heroes

Playing certain factions, you often find yourself with redundant heroes- particularly diplomacy oriented factions who rarely engage in combat or have very few systems to govern (the Umbral Choir comes to mind).

So my thought was that you could give players the options to assign one or more heroes to laiase with other empires on your behalf as ambassadors.

As to how it would work, my thought was that assigning a hero as an ambassador to a given empire would provide incrementally increasing bonuses to diplomatic pressure, reduce the cost of diplomatic actions, increase the benefits of treaties, and unlock certain special actions over time (IE: improving a given empire's attitude towards yours)- improving based on the hero's level and the length of time they'd been assigned.