Trained units for most races will have a hard time wearing heavy armor and weapons unless some traits are spent on increasing strength further increasing the cost and training time even more than the armor alone did.  Archers are welcome to spend their traits on strength so that they can wear heavy armor, but those are traits that aren't making them better archers.  Its a valid choice, heavy armor on your strong archers is fine if that is what you want.  But there are strategic costs to it (it will reduce their init, making them attack less frequently, use your metal supplies, increase their training time and use some of their traits).

 

I haven't been able to get myself in a situation to test this. If I have 1 Metal Mine and 2 cities, can only 1 city build a unit that requires metal? If so, can only the city with the mine build said metal using unit? This might be a very effective way to balance the expensive heavy hitters, especially if this is applied to Crystal as well.

My opinions are two part in regards to changes.

Dex penalties should be proportional, not linear, and maybe more categories of encumbrance.  Over half of max encumbrance should reduce basic move to 1.  This would be a separate penalty.  That said, chainmail/platemail on the battlefield should require heavy weapons or magic to do any sort of real damage.

Horses and Wargs move bonus should be impacted by encumbrance as well, over half encumbrance should reduce basic move to 2.

As for Champions: I think these changes would be nice.

Path of the Assassin (that I would rename Path of the Rogue).  It's considered an underpowered school.  What I would do is buff its abilities, but have the abilities reduce encumbrance.  Master Scout might be a -20% to encumbrance, Graceful might be a -10%.  That said, it would gain some nice promotions.

Encumbrance levels decrease spell mastery and increase tactical mana costs.

Backpacks should be a proportional reduction to encumbrance, like 25 or 50%.  That's it.

Path of the Defender would get a skill to increase encumbrance limits.

New high level Earth spell: would allow halving the weight of an item for 250 mana.

Path of the Warrior would be unaffected.

Path of the Governor would be unaffected by this (needs other buffs)

One last semi-related idea:  Starting at level 5, you would have a 1% shot of getting each of the path promotions to pop up.

Also, I'd like to see class promotions pop up, where if you met certain prerequisites (like owning a shard, or having certain stats), you can promote your "path" to a "class", which would open up new promotions (and lock you out of other class ones).  They'd be more powerful then the current path, but you'd miss out on the promotions from the path that you don't have.

On re-reading it looks like they're suggesting that the abilities reduce the amount of encumbrance the rogue can endure. So if a normal amount of encumbrance someone can take is 100, the rogue can take 80.

Edit: Additional: Thinking about it, this could work. The rogue could get a traits such as one that lowers their encumbrance limit, but gives them a dodge bonus proportional to their level (like Discipline). Eventually it would add up so only a few traits could have this encumbrance penalty, but it would be amusing to see a Rogue pretty much just wearing clothing and armed with a longsword, standing a solid chance against heavily armoured champions.