I agree with the OP. In my current game I've only just found the AI cities and my heroes are already level 15+. A slider or setting would be a good option. I prefer games with a more epic feel (slow research etc).

Well, 3x7=21, so yeah, your city would level at turn 7   

Personally, I think the leveling rate is great at the moment.  I find that the first 10 levels are so are kinda boring, especially with my play style (one high-powered ubermage of doom, with all 5 magic schools via Enchanters), so it's nice to see that I'm able to get to level 16+ now without unnecessarily prolonging the game.  As was mentioned earlier in this thread, it adds to the one-more-turn aspect of the game seeing your champions and sov consistently grow in power.

Honestly, I'm less concerned about Hero exp gain than I am with unit exp gain. Units just seem to level so slow if you don't take things like Trainer or General. While those are interesting background traits and I don't mind them, it just seems weird to see it be so slow. That, or it feels slow because I'm not noticing when they level versus the heroes, that's always possible.

I would bump unit XP to be 75% of hero's XP instead of 50%. I would also add in some more XP needed to level early on, as well as later levels. Increasing the Exponent factor by .2 and the coefficient by .5 in the leveling equation has been good for me. I would like to see levels past 10 take much longer to get, but also have more powerful traits available. Really Wildlands would be more needed if killing bosses was the only way to get higher levels. This would solve two problems.

I'm ok with the leveling rates up to 9.  After 9 it needs to be slightly slower, and after 15 much slower.

Tutelage is almost gamebreaking, perhaps it should be a linear impact, +1 xp*shard per battle, and moved to air 3, with thunderstrike moving to air 2.

I'd rather see the xp bonus to unit traits changed to make the units buffer (those perks already exist though)

Even the tough monsters are becoming a cakewalk for even a solo hero once you hit lvl 15 or so.

what you refer to?

<ExpBaseOnPointsToLevelUnit> from 2.9 to 3.1?

Maybe just take away most of the Potential perks so that there's only one which grants +20%, instead of something like the +45% or so we have now (not counting Knowledge for mages).

For units, I feel their XP should be divided by their maximum size so that there's at least some incentive to build smaller units once you have the technology for larger ones. If not divided, then a set XP factor which can be modded inside the group type tags.

So are you folks playing on dense monsters with heroes that have bonus XP attributes?

well dense is much much more fun but yeah right now its not balanced

In my opinion the potential traits or the + xp spell are not needed in 0.952, because you level already very fast, but in 0.95 the traits and the spell were needed if you want to reach a high level.

There is a multiplier set to increase the XP needed at each additional level, as well as an exponent. So the function is something like Level = M(XP)^E. By adding to the exponent, we get later levels to take more XP. By adding to the multiplier, we get early levels to take more XP. I keep the base points at default to make the equation less complicated.

My only issue with exp is that we don't get enough exp while fighting opponent's units.  We get plenty while fighting lions, tigers, and bears oh my, but when Gilden rolls in with stacks of 256 hp each, we get like 25 exp.  In contrast, one bear gives you like 38 exp.

From what I can tell, they are trying to avoid one battle loss leveling the enemy to higher levels. That would be fine if each army was easy to produce, but it does take about 50 turns and alot of resources to train an army. I understand that losing this army is a huge cost, but giving so little XP from the battle does feel a little unfair, when you think about how much Hp a winning army suffers and that they may be fighting multiple factions.