It totally IS the case, you just aren't playing the game right!

(Ok ... I just had to reply like that once to see how it feels to combat criticism with fanboy/fangirl'ism .... it felt pretty good at first, but then I felt dirty inside.)

To answer for real:

It totally IS the case!  You can take a ring, spend 3 days walking across the continent, then summon a creature and hitch a ride (teleport) back to the kingdom.

BLAM .. there you go, your Sovereign is Samwise.

Champions ought to multiply the values of their stats by their level.

Thus, at level 1 you have a normal sov.

At level 10, You've got a sov with maybe 100HP/100 Attack/200INT. This sounds about right.

If your average stat progression ranges from 10-20, then you're looking at a progression of

10-20-30-40-50-60-70-8-90-100

This easily matches up to company scale progressions we see later game.

5-20-40-80-160

With the magic item multipliers, Heroes will easily be on par with company scale units at the appropriate time.

This is such a natural progression I'm not really sure why it wasn't implemented in the first place?

One way to approach the issue is to have a royal guard - regular units led by Champions or Sovereign who can add their stats to that of the squad's. It doesn't circumvent the system and makes a fair amount of sense, why wouldn't a leader have a personal guard?

Edit: this could also introduce new uses for the charisma stat which is currently pretty underwhelming...

I like the idea of a guard unit in the mid-late game, I just modded my elementaldef, and can see how it is with increase leveling for the Sov, I do wish I can find where the Champions are located, so I can edit them too, but can't seem to find that. I will say, thank god your able to infinitely stack amulets and rings as that's the only way to keep your Champions on par with higher level creatures-soldiers as it's insane. 

Why not tie it to level? 

Honestly your sovereign SHOULD be about level 9/10 when you start fielding companies. And it's pretty easy to get Champions from level 1-3 or 4 later in the game, especially when recruiting champions in 'the wild'. Ideally your champions in general would wind up level 4-5 after general usage.

With a flat ten modifier, your looking at an average of 

level 4*10= 40 Con and each con=3 HP, therefore an average level 4 champion has 120 HP. That's pretty close to a company of veterans.

Honestly, can someone tell me how to mod this? I'd like to try it out.

Another idea is tying a multiplier for attributes to your Notable Level/Quest techs, IE your attributes might be modified by Notable Level*(some balanced number x)*Level

For anyone curious, changing this value is universal for heroes (sov and all npcs).

Hahaha that got a good laugh.

That, and that there's no way to control the rate at which a Sovereign levels. Ideally a nation that's mostly enjoying peace and a nation that has been warring for most of the game should be able to have Sovereigns and Champions of similar strength when they meet/go to war with each other. With a level-based system the power level of Sovereigns and Champions would be all over the place - as compared with other Champions/Sovereigns and regular units both.

Is there some specific folder structure I have to create in which to place this file? I have tried copying it everywhere and it never actually changes anything in game. I am starting a new game, but I just don't see my changes.

Nevermind... no idea what it was, but it finally started working correctly.

For those who would like to change this, here is a step by step guide to change stat and experience gains for sovereigns and stat gains for champions.

1. Go to your Elemental/data/English (or whatever language version you have) and look for elementaldefs. Copy it over to your Mods folder, which is in the elemental main directory. It is not necessary to create subfolders, atleast not in this case.

2. Open up your file and look for

[qoute]        <!--** LEVEL UP **-->
        <StatPointsPerLevelUp>1</StatPointsPerLevelUp>
        <!-- when trained units get XP, they use it towards leveling up, but also give this percent to the sov. -->
        <XPPercentTrainedUnitsGiveSov>10</XPPercentTrainedUnitsGiveSov>[/quote]

2a. Changing StatPointsPerLevelUp to 10 gives you 10 stat points every time a sovereign or champion levels up, but it also does so for the enemy, so you can't cheat with it.

2b. Changing XPPercentTrainedUnitsGiveSov changes the amount of experience your trained units give to the sovereign. This includes monsters, like dragons and spiders, but excludes champions. Every unit gets 5 experience for being inactive and 50 if they were active. This means that with a value of 20 means trained units who didn't participate in the killing only gets 4 experience, but your sovereign gets 1 more for each inactive unit. Likewise for the active ones.

3. Add a shortcut to Elemental somewhere, click on properties and put /createxmlbinary after the target.

4. Start up your game from the shortcut.

4a. Go into options and make sure you have use mods enabled.

4b. Restart the game from the shortcut if mods were not enabled.

5. Press the new game button and go creep some monsters!

These steps are not necessary.  As long as the new file is in the Elemental/Mods folder, the game will pick up the changes.  I know it's not true for some files, but it is true for the elementaldefs.xml.

Ahh, thanks for saying. I just added it to be sure it would work.