[Suggestion] Champ Stack tweaking- my two cents.

Why is the current system unfun?  

It forces you to split your champions up before it's truly viable to do, meaning the early game is a lot slower.

I like the new system and don't find it unfun. You can still use one stack of champs and yes it will be slower exp than splitting them up but they are stronger than the typical one hero and early recruited units. With the current system you can either rush with the mono stack of champs and splitting them up when facing monsters for faster exp while combining them if needed OR send out individual champions with recruited units.

I find that the current solution gives you choices but yes it might take some time for the players to adapt to it.

thats the main point of the (old) problem

champions DONT HAVE TO be in a stack, they have to wander, help different sides of the empire, someone quest while someone else defend and so on

still i dont think this is accomplished, but making less viable and fast the stack of doom helps

anothere real problem right now is that high lvl recruited champs are BEASTS

i could recruit a few lvl 7 and 9 when my sovereign was lvl 4 and they were sooo powerful

Yep, that would be a natural way to limit the power of heroes and it should apply to ranged attacks, too. Abilities like rapid shot (two attacks) or rain of arrows (area attack with a radius of 1 tile) could improve ranged attacks.

No matter how they change it, 1 or more heroes fighting against many multi figure units is a game design catastrophe.

The King's bounty & HoMM model makes a lot more sense.

Build regulars to help your heroes.  The new system is not unfun.

To your other point in the OP, I wouldn't mind them trying to implement some of those ideas, and having specific unit traits that allow champions to destroy more than one unit in a group, Sauron-like (where's that dang movie clip when you need it?.)

Totally disagree! Heroes should be fighting and I think it's fairly balanced now. The system can be tweaked further, but nothing wrong with the design decision.

It takes about 20-30 turns to get a weak regular unit out.  That's a lot of turns of doing little to nothing at the start of a game with any heroes you find early.  (Risking your sovereign is reasonable, risking a champ early game isn't)

I'm not saying kill the idea (at least not without another idea such as my suggestion), but tweak it.

Another suggestion I've made is this:  for low level heroes, reduce the penalty.

A lvl 1 hero shouldn't have a penalty

Lvl 2 should have 25% of the penalty  (so a 2 champ army- the penalty loss would be 12.5% instead of 50%)

Lvl 3 50%

Lvl 4 75%

Lvl 5 is when penalties should become full.

The hero stack problem really only comes into play once heros get a few levels anyways.

What the.... instant action addicts! Go and play Civ I, it will teach you the value of patience and +1 turn!  Seriously, complaining about 20 turns where you have to wait a bit...*Rolleyes*

I do not find 1 hero and a group of units to be unfun. It is more role-playing--esque to me, I build themed armies around hero capabilities and use them to wipe the floor

i dont see the problem

first 40 50 turns you just explore/hire champions and party with all of them together cause its more profitable and safe

then you decide what to do

ie in 1 game i had 2 champions quite weak with traits for towns so after the initial exploration phase ended there was nothing easy to do and they had couple of levels each so i just parked them in town with 20% bonus to build etc and i kept going on hard tasks around with the best champions i had

I haven´t played much, but for me its not unfun, because of what barrynore wrote....

I do not find 1 hero and a group of units to be unfun. It is more role-playing--esque to me, I build themed armies around hero capabilities and use them to wipe the floor

End of quote

im against it, current system seems to be fine

The .86 experience changes largely do seem to fix this problem.  I still think the system needs to be tweaked some though, especially for lower levels, but the concept isn't bad.

last game i played i actually had fun with my champions, leveling is fine imo, i could reach lvl 10 with most of them b4 the game ended

the most annoying part was that ai was really farming hard quests and monsters leaving not much to me