Is there any reason to run with more than 2 or 3 heroes?

They really benefit from being split up, which means basically every hero needs to stand on his own as tanky dps. Making a support hero or a pure caster is generally bad because it means he can't solo stuff easily enough.

There are exceptions of course, but in general focus on just one or two heroes per group, maybe two groups patrolling, if you get more heroes have them stay in towns for defense and they give an unrest bonus for free also.

Mike.

The problem is the old stupid was kinda silly- band of death, but the newer system feels gamey and contrived.   I've never liked it.

I think a decent compromise would be to adjust the penalties for hero stacking by level, or to make the penalty apply based on monster strength and champ level.

epic- no penalty for heroes under lvl 15

deadly- no penalty for heroes under lvl 10

strong- no penalty for heroes under lvl 6

medium- no penalty for heroes under lvl 3

weak- always a penalty

 My real suggestion was to give large groups of troops a bonus vs heroes, like heroes could only kill 1 unit per attack via melee, which would guarantee that heavily armed troops would get good whacks in vs heroes.

It seems like two pools of experience are awarded to the victor of any combat - a champion exp pool which is divided between your champs, and a minion pool that gets divded between all non-champs in your army stack. This lowers the effectiveness of the early-game "band-o-death" strategy involving roaming about stockpiling champions and steamrolling everything you come across - it's a strategy that is perfectly viable even now with the increased exp leveling requirements, but if you settle down and have multiple fronts to defend you aren't hurting by splitting up your champions and giving them militia support, and sending your 1 champion stacks out to various settlements to ensure you have some protection everywhere, and every combat the champ exp pool doesn't go to waste.

That said, there is still plenty of reason to run with more than 2-3 champions. Alot of their abilities that benefit the entire army (or city, or w/e) seem to stack with themselves. So. If you have 3-4 governers, you can knock out silly amounts of unrest and spike growth in a given city, or if you have alot of 'Trainer' champions, the exp bonuses should all stack up I believe to really increase the exp yield from each fight. Accuracy, dodge, initiative army bonuses probably stack up too, so two or three warriors can level similarly and increase the army's effectiveness scarily - if you can manage to get them leveled and still stay in the game in all other respects. It's a beautifully complicated strategy game, and I'm spending too much time playing it.

yeah pretty much this

now champions also reduce unrest in town and can get governor traits

also xp from fighting opponent faction is increased so just recruiting weaker ones and putting them to defend cities is a good thing

another improved would be putting again in every city adventurer guild which combo welll with governor and defenders but i will do a thread about it  soon

I like split xp. Plus.. you are completely overlooking that experience ramps exponentially. Getting double the xp is likely to allow your unit to reach level 10 instead of level 9. Putting a bunch of champions together in a stack does =not= reduce exp, it simply reduces the speed at which you acquire it. Consider that there are x monters/faction units around to trounce. Doing so with all your champions at once splits that bonus between them. If there are two stacks of the same enemy you can either put 4 champions in one group and killing both those units is the same as putting 2 champions in 2 groups and killing them seperately.

Ahem, that said the exponentially increasing xp requirements make "Potential" a completely -idiotic- trait choice and the 10% bonus to altair troups rather meaningless.