I think that a powerful, experienced, well-equipped hero, especially a channeler, should be a major threat to any army. However, this should only really be possible with a good deal of work. Right now, I worry about heroes being too vulnerable since they can be singled out.

I've been arguing since beta that I would like to see a divide between adventuring parties of heroes and armies of large units. This would be in keeping with the 'strategy game in an RPG world' concept.

1) Army:

- Composed of large units of soldiers.

- Capable of capturing territory.

- Cannot engage in quests.

- Slow moving.

2) Adventuring Party:

- Composed of individual soldiers  / henchmen and heroes.

- Cannot capture territory, but can pass across borders to explore, quest, etc.

- Can engage in quests.

- Fast moving.

- Has a chance to avoid armies.

3) Heroes

- Can join armies.

- One hero per army can be selected as the leader, giving the army certain bonuses.

This would create a situation where heroes have a clearly defined role vs. armies. A hero is still important in an army, but shines as part of an adventuring party. This would prevent an 'army' of one hero swooping in to capture a city of thousands of people, forcing players to use armies to take and hold territory. This would also open up the world for exploration, questing, and adventuring, since parties of heroes could move about the world without causing major problems for anyone.

I'm fine with heroes being able to stop armies single-handed, IF there is a value that makes it impossible to do it over and over in a short period of time. For example, an army may have 500 health and a hero may have 500 health. If they face off, the hero should not walk out of that combat with full health.

I would say Age of Wonders does it great. My lvl 15+ hero there is very powerful. It can singlehandedly kill any faction top monster 1v1 and lose just a bit of health. But it cannot defeat whole armies, especially when spellcasting comes into effect. If I send him too far ahead they can gank him and kill him. And it is perfect this way. Better then MoM when once you got a group of 5 heroes with a couple of levels each and some equipment there was nothing the AI could do to stop them.

I like Goontrooper's assesment of strategic advantages and disadvantages (as opposed to merely discussing tactical ones). Sadly, I think the design is far too advanced to implement most of what would be needed to make it work; there are no "classes" of units, and each (hero, army member, etc.) is a piece on the rather uniform board.

Heroes are much better balanced then they used to be.  In the early versions of EWOM you could get a team of heroes in the best armor and a war hammer and they would put the work in on most enemy forces.  Nowadays you have to have a good team of troops with them.  At the current moment I think the balance is just about what it should be.

Good, but here are a couple of additional thoughts for when heroes are in armies:

- Magic focused heroes should give less army bonuses just by their presence than combat focused heroes.

- Combat focused heroes should generally be most effective when used to take out individual important targets (heroes and monsters), and less so when fighting lots of grunts.

- Monsters should be usually be good for fighting large numbers of weaker units than other things.

From what Derek said in his journals, I think we are well on our way to getting there.

Champions\heroes will be specialized units - they have a higher accuracy than normal units, and monsters don't get to do overkill damage to them. I expect that they will be able to pick up additional abilities, such as Monster Slayer (+X to attack, damage and defense versus unit types Beast and Abomination) and Evasion (+X to ranged defense, to simulate that it's rather more difficult to hit a single person at range than one of several standing close together, which is what a normal unit simulates).

However, large number of similiarly leveled and equipped melee units will wear them down. So, a high-level hero with plate armor can mow down enemy peasants but against an army of knights in similiar armor and wielding good weapons, he is best off bringing some friends of his own.

One interesting aspect you raise is whether heroes should have better overland speed than normal units. The answer to that is probably yes, for gameplay reasons - if quests are likely to take adventurers from one end of kingdom to another, it would be nice if it only took a few turns.

Quite how this should be done - several options present themselves:

Basic "Hero" trait grants increased overland movement.

Basic "Hero" trait grants additional movement in own territory only (also for allies who grant right of passage?).

Basic "Hero" trait grants additional movement on roads.

Perhaps a combination of all these?

Also, heroic horses (mounts that only heroes can use), can also provide additional bonuses to all of these.

Thus, early game hero travel will be relatively slow, whilst later game heroes can move around very quickly.