Next suggestion of the day: A loyalty "stat" for champions.
It should be possible for champions to be "poached" from other players, ie being bought off for a great deal of money. (Like the mercenary adventurers I can only presume they are.)
The cost of this and whether or not it succeeds, (certain adventurers should be able to swindle you out of the money then tell you to bugger off) should be based off a "loyalty" stat. This will grow the longer the champion is used in an effective capacity (merchants in high gildar production cities, warriors in combat, adventurers in searching unexplored places in the world) and will lower when the opposite is done. (Warriors left in non-frontier cities would, as an example, lose a great deal of loyalty each turn.) I'd suggest personality traits could be implemented and alter this, but that's unnecessary and probably superfluous at the moment.
The loyalty stat would also be raised greatly by things such as getting married to the royal family (you're going to want to protect your lineage, after all), being given powerful items etc etc. Of course, these should decrease in effectiveness the more they're done.
I would also suggest that adventurers get a much higher wage than other units (1+ gildar per turn) to both stop people hiring them on game start (which is exceptionally annoying).
Champions should also ask demands of your sovereign (hell, I'd say ALL named units should) and denying them will cause them to lose loyalty, maybe even switching sides without being paid. Your royal family could also possibly do this. Demands could be higher wages, items of a certain price / quality, teaching them magic, marrying them to someone etc etc.
This would force players to not just hoard champions (since not using them how they're meant to be used makes them easy for your opponents to obtain) and actually consider what they're doing when they hire them. It would also make champions a lot more organic (instead of the current automatons we're seeing now) and dangerous to keep, as they should be. They're basically mercenaries.
