Hero Leveling Mod

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.

 

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For me, since heroes are now useful at level 3, I don't care as much when one dies or is crippled and sent back home. There are plenty more out there to recruit and I can equip them with a crippled unit's gear if need be. The only problem I am noticing is that regular units seem to be the only thing used by the AI and I can't change that. They also build ridiculously easy to kill armies since I discovered the power of working elemental nodes. I can literally wipe out an entire army with one stike given 3 fire nodes and the AOE fire spell, 38 damage min. This holds true to the wa of magic theme, I just would really like to see the enemy fire off a spell or two.

At any rate I like the heroes much better and am already seeing the AI do signficantly better at expansion and mustering armies of invasion.