I just wanted to write down some of my suggestions about how to improve this game.  Clearly there is room for improvement, the question is, where do you improve?

A little history:  I've played 5 games on Hard with a Large map and 10 opponents, Dense monsters.  I quit each game when it got to the point where i was just auto resolving ALL battles due to the overpoweredness of my 'stack of doom'.  I've had leaders that were melee only, martial ranged (bow)/support spells, full casters, and melee/caster hybrids.  I played with 5 different factions.

Most of the issues that I saw have been outlined in many posts on this forum.  Such as the power curve of the leaders and heroes in general.  The lack luster city portion of this game.  Tactical battles that just aren't tactical.  Technology pacing and general usefulness (uselessness?) of tech.  I wont go into detail on many of these issues, as they have been documented over and over.

I'd like to address solutions to these issues:

Leaders/Heroes

• Have the number of these units that may join a single party tied to the recruiting tech.  To start the game, each Hero/Leader could lead troops, but would be unable to group together until further down the tech path, with a maximum of 5 heroes grouped together.

• Equipment needs to be revisited. Potential solutions:

• Have equipment drops tied to tier of quest and tier of enemy. Level 1 quests give no magic items, level 2 give very low power magic etc...

• Have all the loot cashes (green icons) around the map only have mundane items, or useable items, no magic.

• Have further requirements to use high level gear, such as a requirement for the corresponding tech researched, tied to stats, etc...

• Review some of the more unbalancing traits. 
• If the Leader/Heroes can take more than one action before the other side even gets to act, this leads to very uninteresting fights.  Players spend your first few actions focusing down the unit that might do the most damage then mop up the rest once the enemies start to have actions.  (This particular trait is even worse when you have a wide area spell that fires before the enemies has a chance to act). 
• Traits that add to base stats per level need to be removed.  They do too much for just one trait slot.

• This has been said before and I agree, every time a hero goes down in a battle (won or lost) they should have a wound placed on them.

General Game Play

• MORE RANGE UNITS.  I place this in caps because I believe this is an area that is unbalancing early game (first 100 turns).  A single range unit (Leader with a bow or magic) can decimate everything up to 'Strong' with very little issue.

• (Player/AI)  There should be a new basic range unit type, like slinger or javelin thrower.  Something that you can build right from the start of the game. 

• (Monster) monster groups should have one of; more range options included OR range mitigation tactics/abilities OR speed to close on range units.  If the monsters are able to counter range units, this will force the players to use a more balanced strategy, melee and range units in the same battle group.

• More units in monster battle groups.  Currently the monster groups are so very bland, either all melee or one range and a bunch of melee.  Either way the player just focus's down the range unit and the mops up the rest.  These groups need to be more diverse in their composition.  Each group should have a few of these types of units; melee, range, fast units, tanky units, casters, healers.

• Spells that do wide area damage and multiply damage per unit need to be toned down.  Have spells that do wide area damage, but only apply the damage once.  And spells that multiply damage per unit but only target one square.

Game Start

• Have Leaders start out with a couple units, maybe 2 melee groups of 3 and a range group of 3 (see General Game play suggestions).

• Having range units to build from the start of the game, as well as, monster groups having more units will lead to more interesting choices at the start of city management.  Currently players just queue up everything and go exploring, then when the next tech is done, they queue up all those buildings and move on.  If a player had to make hard choices between building starting units and buildings, combined with potentially multiple groups roaming the land due to Hero grouping restrictions, and those cities may be very busy building units!

These are some of the things I believe will help to balance out the power curve of early Heroes/Leaders.  The changes to range units and monster group composition should lend to more diverse city management in the early game, I'm not sure it will help the late game though.

Thoughts?