Agreed. I think if heroes die, they should get scars even if their side wins the battle.

I agree heroes can be toned down but the biggest problem is the lack of aggressive neighbors.  I was playing with on med map, normal with moderate monsters and once I cleared the area around my cities they were never attacked.  It is too easy to set off on an endless adventure with your heroes and never break up the "Killer stack". Having to defend more would really change the way I played and rolled with my heroes.  Some possible fixes...

-  more places to defend

- more attacks from the wild

- better, more aggressive computer AI (even though on a med. map kingdoms were pretty far away from each other). 

I think right now players who only build hero-only armies have a huge advantage  because A) Heroes are cheaper than regular soldiers Heroes don't need to be produced in cities C) Heroes are very powerful even without any techs from the tech three.

I think balancing the heroes would be easier if there is a cap at level 10 and the XP rewards are reduced to 50 %.

yes, like i said already THIS is the problem

its not too fast or too easy or anything 

the problem is you can do WHATEVER you want, literally, and there is no consequence for that

heroes should be needed to defend both from monsters and from enemies, since they are not you can free farm+

and they should die, sometimes, maybe add a resurrection spell or something like cheat death, but being ALWAYS immortal is no good

That is a great idea. The basic level cap could be 5 for heroes and armies. Heroes could advance beyond that cap to level 10, but only gain 25 % of the current XP and one warfare tech could increase the XP to 50 %.

I think heroes with a level cap are more fun, because the player has to think very carefully about the talent selection, and it would increase the replay value, too.

Agree... It would be good if a hero added a significant bonus and could even level running a city.  This would give another option on how to use heroes and offer another play style.

There should also be monthly wages for heroes, standard units are way more costly.

Limit armor and weapon use based on warfare tech line is a good idea.

My next game I'm going unit heavy to see if I get any other ideas.

I like this idea, and maybe the maintenance ought to be based on the heroes level.

I definitely agree with having a hero level cap that increases as you research certain techs. That should help keep them from getting too far ahead of the other units.

Going back to the hero maintenance idea, when a hero is about to level up it should say somewhere on the splash screen something like "Hey boss, I feel like I've worked very hard for you over the past few seasons.  I demand a 1.7 gildar per season wage increase if you want me to continue performing better." Then you can select whether you want the character to level or not. If not, you can choose to pay him/her off at any time in the future.

I don't see what's so bad about level caps? It seems to me like the simplest way to ensure that they stay in step with the tech tree.

At the moment you have two parallel methods of increasing the power of your units: Research and levelling up. At the moment, levelling champions massively outpace research. Sure, you could nerf experience in some way, but then you run the risk of overcompensating and just having the exact opposite problem.

Even if you manage to balance for one particular map size/research rate, if you take that to a different game setup, it'll skew one way or the other. Tying levels to research solves (or, at least, simplifies) all these problems.

I think people complaining about heroes should bump up the difficulty level and play a few games, then come back and compare. I've been stampeded by enemy heroes and had mine squished into uselessness several times. I use my heroes more effectively than the AI for sure, but that's a balance issue that can be tinkered with down the line. I don't expect the AI to be fully aware of all strategic and tactical abuses, particularly with the vast number of spells in the game right now.

Losing a key hero for ~10 turns can turn the tide when you're playing against the more aggressive AI on the higher difficulties, in a recent game I lost my capital very early in the match due to exactly this.

One issue that I do find extremely annoying however - from what I can tell, if you incapacitate a hero, then attack the nearby city where they are healing, they appear to join the fight even though you just defeated them a turn or two ago - that is lame, they should be out of the game completely until they are restored.

Normal should be rated as normal and not as beginner.  Multiple times I had an outpost or a city completely unprotected and the AI did not destroy it or take it over.  And even sometimes the neutral creatures that had been incorporated into my territory didn't attack when they would have wiped out my only city's militia.