The whole idea is hindering the rate at which heroes skyrocket and blow away the map. Mabye you will have to use regular units to supliment your hero army? Maybe the game will be reprogrammed to not take 18 billion years to research stuff and you can upgrade your heroes that way?

In any case this idea has merit, and -if- you can make your single or dual party champions win battles and gain xp you should be rewarded for doing so. Having xp gains the same for every unit in the army is silly, and as numerous playtests have shown, is severely broken.

An idea for how hero defeat should work.

What about a system like mount and blade where defeated heroes result in one of three outcomes

1) The hero was just knocked out. They will need to recover but there is no status impairment.

2) The hero was injured. Here you would have the various staus effects already seen in the beta as it is.

3) The hero is killed.

A new party stat could be added which alters the percentage chance of these outcomes, this would make for some interesting buffs for the life spell book plus you could perhaps have some building related improvements like a surgery making heroes less likely to die/become injured when in friendly influence.

Would also be cool if heroes could be taken prisoner by the enemy factions, if your party is beaten then there could be a system added where the enemy party would capture and use your hero to fight for them, could be a mind control spell thats lasts so many seasons until it breaks. The spell should lower the heroes stats and you could have them still attack their captors now and then (like the clumsy trait, representing the hero trying to overcome the mind control).

TLDR: Give hero defeat some randomness and tie it in with interesting choices for the player.

I don't see where the punishment comes into play.  What it does is allow a choice for the player (or AI): Do I take a risk and try to go after that mob with my one hero to gain more xp, or do I assemble a party and / or army to DEFINITELY kill the mob, but SHARE the experience.  In no other game that I know of does XP become POTENTIALLY INFINITE while piling on party members in an invading force. 

Right now it's a broken mechanic and most definitely a bug.  You actually WANT to have more party members; there's no incentive to take risks.  It's very bland, and game-breaking.

+1 on possibility of hero death.  Negative traits for falling in combat are great, but so far they don't fall very often for me  and the possibility of permanently losing a hero makes them more precious and makes the player give more thought to their odds of survival in each fight.

What if we limited the number of heroes per group?  Treat them like generals possibly?  One hero per party for every three party slots so three heroes to a party at max tech???

It is difficult to argue this point against someone that not only hasn't played the beta but apparently hasn't played WOM either... The thing is, you need your units to be able to be leveled in groups. Leveling them basically one at a time isn't merely tedious but quite simply changes the entire flow of the game and not for the better. 

Also as a side note, anything the developers intentionally put into a game is not a bug...

It is my speculation that the xp gain as it currently stands is not what they intended, and thus they didn't realize that it was broken.

EDIT: And, fyi, I don't appreciate the more personal tone your posts are taking.  I'm only trying to argue a concept, not criticize you as a person.

It is difficult for me to reply to this without being out right offensive as in believing I have singled you out simply because I don't like you and not because you are arguing a point that I am against has offended me.

But if my wording rubs you the wrong way so to speak allow me to try and explain what I meant. The problem I have with what you are saying beyond that I think it is a bad idea is that you have no apparent person experience or evidence to support what you are saying. In fact it seems your only support for your claims is exaggerating. That is what makes it difficult to argue because you don't so much give examples of how things do work but how you think they work and how your idea would affect that. Basically what I'm saying is due to experience we are on two completely different pages and there is simply no way for us to line up our experiences without you being in the beta.

As for the bug comment I study game design and too many people throw that word around without considering its meaning that was not directed completely at you.

the other option would be to only get what you earn, that is to say a unit gains XP in relation to the damage it dealt to the monster, with a special bonus for the unit that dealt the killing blow, that way the units that spent the whole battle doing nothing get no XP or a very low amount of XP (basically a flat value representing being in the battle)

Thats not the main reason. This perks are good but heroes are godlike completly without it. Just sell all the early found common stuff you don't need to shop and buy every available hero and you have 4+ hero army which steamroll most of stuff and level up fast.

Even 1 Hero is enough to get this run!

You find epic items all around and some of the makes heroes so insane + fast level up.

I have high level heroes 5+ uncommon/epic items and still not even spearman

I understand how you feel.  But do I really need to start off my post by saying "I've been gaming for 40 years and..." for you to understand that what I say could possibly have some merit?  I may be bold, blunt, and crass in my 'tone', but I'm telling you, in all of my vast RPG gaming experience I have never once come across a situation where an encounter did not have a pre-defined amount of XP to dole out at the conclusion, to be mutually shared by all of the winning combatants.  If a hero then has a 10% xp bonus after the split, that's fine, but there should definitely be a finite number of base xp gained at the conclusion of the battle.  This promotes the idea of risk and hardship, instead of the "throwing in the kitchen sink" type dilemma the game is now founded on.

You may not feel the same way and that's fine with me.  But I'm telling you the system as it is now is flawed and lacks merit, and I believe it to be a mistake on the part of the developers.

If it is also that way in WoM then I missed it, most likely because I was so busy digging through the XML to try to tweak the other issues with the game that I failed to observe it.

Incorrect.

Correct.

Maybe you can clarify this section for me.

Incorrect.  As you research technologies, you can build better mid - late game units and upgrade outdated units, and recruit higher level champions.  I know that the system is a little out of whack as the game stands, but when the system is balanced a little better with itself the two ought to line up more organically.

I was trying not to comment on your proposed system fix because I hate caps with a passion, but since I haven't taken the opportunity thus far, let me proceed.

Caps of any sort dumb down the game immensely, because it means I have to play the same exact way every time.  In your case, I level my heroes as quickly as possible to the 'soft-cap', rush the tech I need to open the leveling to the next 'soft-cap', rinse and repeat. Booooooooring.

Maybe I want a singular hero who becomes powerful fairly early.  Maybe I don't want to deal with heroes at all, and want to focus on civ-building and armies.  Your proposed system, and all capping systems, are invasive, ill-construed, heavy-handed, duct-tape-ish, jery-rigging, Neanderthalistic and insult my very meager intelligence.   

FE is not going to be built to be a multi-player experience, and as such does not need to be 'balanced' among players per se, which is what caps heavy-handedly try to accomplish.

And I thought I was being rather nice...