I recently got a chance to take a look at the hero leveling system. CoreUnitStats.xml turns out to be a very easy to mod file that changed everything I thought about this game. I was literally two clicks from archiving the game when I decided to see if I could fix the things that were bothering me the most. Heroes are magical galss cannons in the vanilla version. I decided to give them some more advantages against regular armies. The key is to make your own decisions about how much you want each stat to level for each point. I changed Hitpoints to add 10 for every level point spent. This seems like alot but level 2 creatures generally have more with a much higher attack rating. Then I leveled essence, strength, dexterity, and inteligence at 3 per point. This has had the effect of allowing fighters to be get a high attack and defense with the small potatoes weapons we have in v1.08b. Casters stay pretty equal to what they were, except that they can be a little more feasible as battlemages if you level them properly. I also added sight as an upgradeable, 4 points of sight per level point and made strategic movement give 1 move per point so a cheap scout hero can explore much faster. I basically changed speed to give +1.0 per point so that a fighter needn't spend two or three levels trying to get an extra strike per turn.

This is a very simple bit of modding that took ten minutes to make. It may not be the right stats for everyone but it certainly made the game much more enjoyable for me. I encourage others to experiment with the unit stats file and post here how they are changing gameplay for better or worse.