Proposals to reduce the insane combat effectiveness of melee heroes:

1. Increase costs to level, or reduce the rewards thereof. Or better yet, reduce the time it takes to train units.
2. There should be fewer “individual melee” level bonuses, and more army enhancing bonuses. Make the generals, not human cuisinarts.
3. Heroes are one person. Units are multiple figures, but one can assume that each figure represents at least a “squad” soldiers. The comparative damage raters are way off base. Leave the high hero HP (to keep them survivable) but greatly reduce the damage dealt when fighting a unit as opposed to another single figure. Say, reduce the damage done by a hero to a unit by a factor of 10.
4. Upkeep costs for heroes.

Each person represents a person. They are taken from a pool of your actual population. Not that important, but considering how much rebalancing would need to be done to decrease trait bonuses, I would think a better fitting solution would be to simply make it harder to level. 

I don't agree with 2 or 3. I believe number 2 should be possible but not mandatory (ie allow leadership specialized heroes but don't require this). Number 3 is inaccurate because each figure is not supposed to represent a squad it is really one person and I think doing this would make heroes significantly less fun to play with and feel a lot less like heroes.

I don't like number 4 and I think other options should be considered first.

I do agree with number 1 in that it needs to take longer to level your heroes because their pacing seems a little off with the rest of the game.

Champions should gain injuries when they fall in combat but survive because you won the fight. That appears to be a very good suggestion to me.

In fact them not getting injuries is extremely overpowered once you start thinking about how to exploit it. Imagine, you have an immortal shieldwall in front of you of 3 champions. So what if they die? You don't lose anything from it except a little xp. That makes champions the most expendable in any tactical fight. That's dumb.

How about tech requirements for champion equipment? That way champions don't outpace normal units equipment wise. So most champion equipment isn't useless you could stagger it a level, so that champions can always use equipment 1 tech higher then normal units but not 2 or 3 techs higher.

I originally proposed the use of champions as army boosting units and I really like this idea.. however.. I have only managed 2 reasonably long playthroughs (several hundred turns) since the release and in my first game I had level 9 spearmen (Tier 1 tech) that had more health and did more damage than my similarily leveled heroes!

The balance issue is likely tied to being able to run around destroying everything with your 'superstack of doom' regardless of what it's unit composition is. But hey if you remember playing master of magic, that was part of the fun of the game. What might help remedy this is a soft cap on regular unit levels and stronger initial unit strength of produced units.

Using the items that are found around the world could be tied to the adventuring level techs.

Less HP from level-ups. Less level-ups (with maybe some quests where you gain a lot more experience). No cannon-fodder champions. It is easy to fight the harder monsters, because you can hit with your super-units, while your not-so-good champions are there to take the blows. If they die, no matter! They are instantly back with no long-term effects.

While the world is now interesting, I would like it more if you were really surrounded by the world, so that you would need to break through the monsters, not just circle them and pick the monsters you can fight and get all the nice items there are in the world. Nice items should be guarded. So, in my opinion the world should be even harder when far away from your starting location, and have less loot accessible early on.

The harder monster should have even more defense / dodge as they do now. You can pretty easily kill them by having multiple champions (and thus a lot of renewable HP) because your hits still hurt them pretty badly, while the enemy probably needs still 2 hits to kill (temporarily) one of your champions. Champions maybe would need to be more item-based, not so much level-based, and the high-end items would only be available from the late quests. Thus, more idea for quests, and less deadly champions early on.

The game is really promising, but there is a lot of balancing needed. I like to play it, but it is pretty boring to play it competitively. Get some champions, get them to around level 5 and game over, because after that it is too easy to just pick your fights and level-up them until they are unstoppable. At that time I can perhaps already build spearmen...

I don't think anything needs to be nerfed (except maybe fireball), the AI just needs to become more intelligent about leveling and preserving their units. I don't think I've seen the AI ever running around with a level 3+ normal unit because they don't seem to care about letting them die in combat. They don't seem to be programmed to farm exp like players, so their armies are always stupidly weak. Our units/champions aren't too strong, theirs are too weak, they have the same tools and potential they just don't have the slightest clue what to do with them.

it doesnt really

i dont understand why you want immortals champions

and your idea wouldnt prevent the abuse of letting them tank no remorse

then ppl say melee are OP , ofc they are op if they can do load of dmg, tank some , and EVEN DIE cause there is no consequence...

the con of being melee should be just that, you can deal some real dmg but then being in the middle of the fight die too

if you remove the con of dying then...

also lets not talk about the absence of counterattack, discussed for months on elemental beta and now we dont have it anymore, ofc melees are again OP...

FYI I've found it fairly easy to find potions that remove injury traits so the idea of balancing champions by giving them injuries when they fall in victorious combat is sort of moot. You just wait until those traits become a problem then chug a potion.

Are we taking into consideration some of the larger wilderness life out there, like the elemental lords? What little I've got to experience of FE, it would seem the that Heroes really are not that overpowered due to sustaining injuries and running into someone else's Hero consistently. Fallen heroes don't gain EXP during that battle also. 

What about something of a 'random' chance factor....

Perhaps, on death/fallen in battle :  

% chance for non-permanent injuries. (Turn based recovery)

% chance for permanent injuries.

% chance for permanent death. 

% chance for equipment loss. ( Looting / Damaged by battle.) 

% chance for defection/captured by the enemy. 

% chance for no negative effects. 

Edit 1 : As per the potions that remove negative effects, they could be made rarer to counter their reliability of ever getting your Hero patched back up.  

Level 10, I can kill dragons in 2 blows with my main hero. And after looking at the sort of weapons there are in this game... well, let's say it can get MUCH worse.

Medium/High level wildland creatures are really underpowered. They stop being scary after 100 turns/level 8. They become a chore at that point.

Also, high-end weapons need a small nerf.

I second the notion that champions who fall in battle should sustain injuries regardless of whether you win or lose the battle.

Also champions heal way too fast on the strategic map, regardless of whether they move or not.

I'm not sure you are playing the same game as me. Maybe you are thinking about baby forest drakes and calling them dragons, and you don't even see any medium or high level monsters by turn 100. Troll groups with 300+ health are still lower level stuff, and those are pretty much impossible to beat with just 2-3 level 10-12 sov/champs.

I want to qualify this after playing Tarth. Ranged combat heroes appear to be quite weak, quite worse than Archer units. Melee champions are death on roller skates, just keep leveling and equipping them constantly and nothing can keep up.

I think if we started differentiating hero types the problem with power-leveling with gear might fix itself more. I think there should be these types of heroes with very different types of gear:

Assassin, Spellcaster, Guardian, Warrior, Assassin, Archer.

Part of the problem is the melee types don't have a lot of difference and get almost all the gear.  I would like to see Assassin made into more of the "single target" killer like a true assassin. One shot abilities, low defenses that are horrible when fighting groups. Gear that features stealth over protection.

Guardian should be more of the general. The gear as well as the abilities should enhance the entire army.