Based on my experiences with playing Endless Space (especially multiplayer), I'd like to suggest a couple of changes on the heroes.



1. Managers are almost useless. They are said to give benefits on research output. While I think this is true, they can not be improved further in this direction. I basically don't know on what to invest once he can be promoted.

2. Admins are too important at the moment. My brother currently plays Horatio and thus is dependend on the heroes to have benefits from his races traits. Now, as managers are not useful and admirals aren't of use in the early game, Horatios trait oftenly leads to zero benefit. Yet if he has an admin, the benefit is large as he can send admins quickly due to cloning. My suggestion is to reduce the extra plus for admins for each promotion, but make more promotions to improve on industry, food... Thus, the benefit for Horatio may be delayed. As is, we restart games often till we have a game were he gets an admin. After all, admin should not be that influential, but rather give a nice bonus.

3. Heroes should get some type of random seed in order to make them vary from each other. Currently, I do the same promotions all the time leading to the same heroes differing from each other in their name only.

4. There shouldn't be 3 heroes from the start of the game on and then last for ever. Instead, heroes should leave after a couple of turns (30?) if they didn't get hired. Then, new heroes should appear more often (maybe new race stats could be introduced to improve on the frequency new heroes appear?).

5. It might be interesting if the heroes race would be of importance. For example. if you have a sophon hero and then declare war against his race, there might be some risk that the leader deserts. Also, a heroes of your own race might give extra benefit.

6. Considering the above, Horatio may need work to rebalance.



Hope you guys find the suggestions above useful as the current heroes appear a bit uninspired and static.

1) At the current state, trade is a huge factor in science output and managers can give incredible boosts to systems trade output. So I don't find the useless at all. They have been a key factor in science victory competitions afaik.



2) Yep, they do feel really strong in early game and many players want to restart the game if they don't get an admin hero at start :I



3) Umm, they do vary atm. They got different starting stats. Granted, that's not much. So you'd want them to have random promotions?



4) +1 for this (heroes leaving on their own if they don't get hired), good idea and can't remember seeing this suggested before. The left side of the tech tree has some techs that shorten the time for next hero arrival.



5) +1 for this too, good idea



6) Mmh, maybe.



Agreed, current heroes are too static.

1) At the current state, trade is a huge factor in science output and managers can give incredible boosts to systems trade output. So I don't find the useless at all. They have been a key factor in science victory competitions afaik.

Hmmm... trade might be something I have underestimated so far... Yet I can't remember seeing promotions to improve the hero in that direction - I may have missed them.

3) Umm, they do vary atm. They got different starting stats. Granted, that's not much. So you'd want them to have random promotions?

Not entirely different promotions, but basically yes. Maybe also the order of the promotions could be different (like hero A can be promoted to food producer and then industry booster, hero B vice versa).



So, according to the rules I have to start own threads for these, right? Okay, I guess I'll do so once I have a bit more time to back up this really wasn't suggested before.

I guessed that by managers, you mean corporate heroes. You can see all the abilities here: http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Abilities

Sawy Business and Smart Investor skills can give huge bonuses. But notice that you need to have negotiator ability leveled up for those to show up, maybe that's why you've missed them.