Being able to set up marriages to your kids with random champs or other being who are not of another faction would be nice too. Keep it all in the family.

Agree with your ideas as well.

Something has to be done to kids, because right now, i treat them as baby machines to make me more units with +1 to gildar/research and thats about it. Although most of that is because kids still start with 1 move quite often, which is stupid since they become unable to do anything.

Would love to see this added, right now the kids are just useless eye-candy.  But as for # 3, I would rather there be aging, with the ability for the sovereign to die. To counter your fear, just make it so the player can choose who becomes the next sovereign so you are bound to have at-least 1 good character to choose. That or make it so the oldest born Son is the new sovereign , or oldest daughter if no Son is present, or oldest Brother / Sister, if no child is present. That way you at-least know who you need to level before your sovereign gets old and dies.

I give this idea a .

True, they have "some" use but all that leads to is having a very big overabundance of hero's. It wouldn't add a rush factor, it would add more to realism. There are season, and years... but everything remains the same. If you need a entire army of hero's, then to me that is not how the game should be played. Army's should be made up of one or two hero's that lead the army in battle. If your going to just send entire army of hero's, were is the strategy in that.

Also with no aging, your free to level a couple of hero's with no penalty for not leveling the rest of your hero's. With aging, if you are not leveling all your hero's, it can come back on you. It adds more strategy and a deeper game-play in my opinion.

Plus it will be a better game, if the enemy had to kill your sovereign and any hero than can take the throne. Basically wiping you all out... if all they have to do is kill your sovereign then it's not as challenging.

There are many games that disagree with you... The total war series for one, nobody rushes in these game, and the hero's or Generals age and die. In all depends on how it's handled... if there enough things to level and improve all your hero's, it won't make a difference when they die. It all comes down to the player, ie you, and how the game is handled. If you don't know how to play, you may rush to get something done before your character dies, but if your smart you will use strategy, which this game is, to level all your character, especially ones that will take the throne. There just has to be enough things to help you level your characters. Right now players don't even need an big army, why because there is way to much of an overabundance of hero characters, effectively making big army's useless, depending on the player.

Also it would take a while for characters to die, were not talking 20 or 30 turns... think about it. There are what, 2 - 4 seasons per yer (can't remember if they game goes through all the seasons or not), which means if character were set to die between 70 & 100 years that would be 140 - 280 to 200 - 400 turns before death of old age. In this game that would be a lot of time to level your character.

Again it's all in how you play, the adventure tree is there for "Adventure", it increase things for adventuring... but that doesn't mean your need an "entire" army of hero's to go on said adventure.

There is nothing that says something like this couldn't be optional under settings, I just think for the players that want it, it would be a nice thing to have.

I'm not sure.

The reason I originally envisioned dying of old age was that my empires tended to get a ton of new heroes and they seemed to just pile up unless they die in combat(not very often).  The question is, how many heroes should there be in a kingdom at a time? 

Also, there is the other side where you keep the children and only have dieing from combat.  The reason for breeding them off would be to create the perfect skill class for each sibling.  I had thought that perhaps the higher on the gene tree the character is the more his stats were favoured instead of the mate. For instance you breed two characters together, one is a first gen child, the other is a 2nd gen of another faction.  The first gen would give 60% of the stats/skills to the child and the second would give 30%.  These skills would be randomized from each skill set and a potential random skill thrown into the mix. 

At the moment, this is an area that needs a ton of work.