Zach wrote:
OK how about this.



1. To start with you can't recruit heroes of another race until you research some technology, (I am not sure which one, I think there is some sort of "Xeno Diplomacy" tech that mentions heroes)



2. You cannot recruit heroes of a race that you haven't met yet. And having better relations to an empire of a particular race will increase the odds of having a hero of that race come up for recruitment.

Please leave it to the RNG to determine what's realistic. Why can't a wandering hero offer me his services just because his faction isn't in the current game?

PekkaTa wrote:
I find this immersion breaking too. Design goal should be to make different factions feel different. And faction-specific heroes would count towards this goal.



I don't see any reason why heroes should be mixed.

Well put. Heroes are the face of your empire; your empire personalized. I don't feel I'm playing a specific race if my heroes are all from different factions from my own (no matter how convincingly someone explains how a Sophon empire has Cravers, Imperials and Sowers as its Heroes).