I'm not much of an idea man, but while thinking on it this morning I had an idea. Hopefully others will like it and be able to run with it, I don't think i've seen it specifically mentioned yet but I could easily be wrong as the forum seems to move incredibly fast. Anyway here it is:

First completely separate the marketplace items from items for unit creation, normal units shouldn't be using the same stuff your champions are, and recruited champs should NOT want to join your faction if that's what your going to give them. There would need to be a totally separate list of weapons/items for sovs/champs these would be "named" items, would possibly eventually become magic items, normal units would just use normal items like they do now, those should be the ones that feel basic and vanilla, not your champions.

You could then spread these special items throughout many of the research trees instead of just warfare. Special items in the adventure tree makes perfect sense(maybe a long lost dagger that once belonged to a legendary king), magical type items in the magic tree, you already have this with rings/amulets so adding weapons here would be very easy, warfare is obvious and if you really get creative there could be ways to integrate them into diplomacy and civ trees as well. If you spread them out well enough there could be quite a bonus for going deep into say the diplomacy tree early, one that would make any other faction back off a bit just knowing you have the item, clever things like that.

This would possibly do a few things,

1. Add flavor and content, especially with things like legendary items you could easily add some history and story into the game with long descriptions and a story behind the item. Adding Armor and jewelry into the mix and now we're talking about a ton of potential items to choose from. Plus it easily distinguishes champions from normal units, and it makes me want to get that next item even more.

2. Choices, if we add magic weapons and items with skills there's a huge opportunity to be able to further distinguish champions, want a spear wielding fast moving mounted champion that can attack from afar? done, a mace/shield wielding tank type? easy, the possibilities are almost endless with enough imagination. This makes things like outfitting and deciding what champion gets what much more fun. I would love to see things like robes and stave's for caster champions for instance.

3. Totally differentiate champions from normal units, you can still have special normal units with normal items and those will be great but having things like legendary items/quest items/special look items, it all helps to make that connection for the player to care about the champions. Like I said above units should be basic, even in end game, champions should be EPIC.

From there you could even go more crazy and add items that can't be researched/bought through quests (add more quests, tons more) and preferably loot from kills. Adding things like specialized mounts for champions with bonuses, fierce wargs with +attack, armored horses with +defense etc. Backpacks with special bonuses not available to normal units.

I'm sure plenty of people will think, "hey just get to modding and do it yourself" and sure maybe I could, but to me that wouldn't help solve the main problem that the game has, the overall lack of any flavor. Not everyone will download mods in fact it's usually a pretty small percentage of people that download mods with large changes to the game. I'm sure there's people doing some of these ideas right now with mods and that's great (i've screwed around with quite a few items in my game already) but the game needs more stuff just about everywhere and I would love to see more item models for modders to choose from and idea's for modders to wrap their heads around, in the game now from the developer, them adding more now just means better and more complete mods in the future imho.

Obviously there's a ton of balance and bug fixes that would need to get done first (MAGIC PLEASE) but this could be a easy way to add a ton more content and help with things like choices that the player has to make. If you add stats/bonuses to the items then it would maybe be much easier to have champions mean much more in the mid/late game as well. It would mean adding a TON of stuff to the game but it really really really needs it in my opinion.