Agreed entirely that the players champions get a bit too unbalancingly powerful, in large part due to the AI not building up its own champions enough and in smaller part to the AI not building the right vanilla troops to counter them (or not using them the right way on tactical map).

However I disagree entirely with the suggestion of having two build queues. It is a thousand times better for the player to have to choose between 'butter and guns'.

The real problem is player champions being strong, ai champions/troops/tactics being weak. Lets fix that rather than get sidetracked!

I like having 1 build queue.

I like having strong champions.

I like strong AI.

The important questions are can the AI effectively create and use strong champions as well as a human? if so then all is well. If not, then what can be done about it?

If the AI cannot keep pace with the human champions then the game quickly gets stale as the human champion becomes unstoppable and no lesser units are truly needed and no one builds them so why have them in the first place?

It all comes down to what can actually be done AND THEN what can be done to make what can actually be done FUN!

An entire dragon's hoard is useless if one does not have the means to get it out of the mountain in the first place.

Again, I love this game and have faith but how does the populace at large view this issue?

Is it better to be the heir to a great kingdom that you will never inherit or the only son of a poor man that will get all of his fathers copper pieces?

This game is a hybrid between RPG and RTS. Perfectly matching the power of the two is very difficult and for people just trying to win rather then "enjoy the ride" choosing the one that is more powerful (the RPG portion) as a path to victory just makes sense. I believe that the lore supports the RPG element being the more powerful one and I see no issue here.

So there is nothing wrong with super sovs... in fact its the main theme of the game. This is like skyrim only instead of cooking and being promoted to thane you get to own cities and train armies. And frankly its a game will greatly enjoy if it stops being so damn coy about what it is and starts properly fleshing out the RPG side of things which is currently way underdeveloped.

Or rather then the horribad suggestions from the OP the TBS aspect can be made more powerful and this will make it into a more balanced hybrid then a heavily RPG favoring game.

EASIEST way I can see of doing it is getting rid of the ridiculous 3 turns minimum to build any unit or structure limit, slash structure costs (say, in half), and introducing competent city management AI (and making it available to players). Cities will suddenly finish building up and be able to spend turns building armies. At the moment building armies means not building +mana, +gold, or +research buildings all of which empower your super sov. But if your cities are sitting idle they would be put to work building armies. BAM, armies exist and now its a a balanced hybrid.

I do understand that the hardest part of developing a game like this is balancing.  It makes herding cats look easy!!!  And I understand that the developers have their vision of this game and that's what they are going to develop.  BUTTT...  here are my thoughts if anyone is interested.

I like heroes being powerful!  They're supposed to be!  But I don't like trained units being totally useless either.  And it takes so LONG to get techs to build units that are useful (and then actually BUILD those units) that I'd be bored out of my mind if I had to wait until I could build decent units to fight some of the mega mobs out there.  Moving Leather Armor closer to the start of the tech tree helps some.  But I think a better selection of low-level "Crude" weapons available either at the very start or quickly researched might help.  Techs researched can then provide upgrades.  In my perfect "Fallen Enchantment" world, every Army would be composed of approximately 1/3  to 1/2 heroes and balance trained units.  And it should be nearly a requirement that every army have a mage or at least an archer or two to deal with enemy mages.  Of course, I know that's MY vision and not necessarily Stardock's vision.

I also tend to agree that the combined build queue also discourages building trained units.  I have to say, I'm not sure I understand the argument against having two different queues.  Allowing the building of lots of trained units (as cannon fodder if nothing else) would encourage opponents to do the same.  Make them easy to build and then use maintenance cost as an easy way to control the numbers.

The problem with slowing down the leveling of heroes to me is that then suddenly, you're surrounded by monsters you can't defeat and you're stuck clicking the "Turn" button waiting on trained units powerful enough to help to be researched  and then built.  In the earlier beta, I had that happen to me several times and it's frustrating.  The solution to that would be increasing the map size but right now the game isn't balanced well for larger maps (OP heroes is even worse!) and there is the memory problems.  As it stands now, I don't think that map size balances well and probably never will until XP is controlled by map size.

I don't dislike having heroes more powerful than units.  I think they should be.  But I don't think a small group of two or three heroes should be able to steamroll everything it its path.  The ideal situation would be to have types of units that are especially effective against heroes but I can't think of any way to implement that at present.  Shrink works pretty well against large, single monsters and could work well against melee type heroes but it is really easy to resist.  I would fix shrink so it is harder to resist for heroes.

An option for dealing with mages might be a "Silence" spell that prevents (at least for a few turns) a mage from casting any spells.  But, as a pairing to that, you would need a "Remove Enchantment" spell that would allow removal of such spells including Shrink and Silence.  The net effect could be that mages become as much or even more defensive rather than pure offense.  It may also force players to cultivate spellcasting more in heroes and space them out more.  The effect being a city without a spellcaster could be a sitting duck. 

Another option would be to restrict spellcasters to not be able to wear armor (or perhaps metal armor) or use a shield and tune the AI to target mages and sovereigns.  This forces mages to be we well protected and vulnerable.  It also forces players to choose whether their heroes will be mages or melee.  One game mechanic I really liked in WoM was the Imbue Heroe for this reason.  But I do think that the "Paths" mechanic makes up for that.  But I think the wearing of armor and the use of certain weapons should be a trait gained through a Path and not something that every hero can do.  I also think that once a Path is chosen, no other Path can be chosen.

I think it would also help if Army size is increased.  Right now I have no trouble filling out the ranks of my pitiful 4 or 5 unit armies and getting beyond that takes too much research time.  And having larger armies of monsters with cannon fodder encourages more cannon fodder.

Some sort of artificial "aggro" might be useful for trained units to allow them to protect heroes.  This might also give them some usefulness particularly in protecting more vulnerable mages. This makes archer units natural mage killers.   To balance archers, shields should give a HUGE "dodge against ranged" bonus (and guess what, mages can't carry shields)  so that melee units are protected against archers.

Right now, I think the mana balance is better but a bit stingy.  Mages should need to sit out of smaller fights to conserve mana but be crucial for bigger fights.  It should be difficult to defeat larger mobs or opposing heroes without a mage.  It should also be a big disadvantage to go against a mage without a mage.  Mana availability is a good way to regulate this by preventing a mage from being able to blaze through all the fights.  But how do you balance this with monsters?  Perhaps higher level monsters should either be mages (like elementals) or perhaps have some buffs requiring debuffs.  Not sure without thinking about it.

Anyway, this is my amateur Game Designing thoughts.  Flame me if you want.  I don't really care.

I've got a question. During my first playthrough about a month ago, I didn't know better and built lots of troops. I even designed some units I liked and had full armies for every hero. It was fun! But I came to the forums to search for how to upgrade from a party of 3 to a company or whatever the next bigger group is. I also wanted to know how to upgrade my high level foot soldiers to the new mounted guys with lightning hammers that I had designed. I don't know that I've built another unit since finding out that these things can't be done. Has anyone considered that this might be why units are garbage?

If I've got two groups of 3 loyal defenders who have been on numerous harrowing adventures with my sovereign since the dawn of the kingdom, why can't THEY get some horses? Why can't they take on some new recruits to shore up their numbers (and maybe lose a couple of levels)? What can't they have access to a blunt weapon that I can produce just because they started with a sword? I'm not taking these losers along if they only have two moves, can't hit for crap, and can't increase their hp's by adding more soldiers.

The upgrade ability is awful is what I'm getting at. Trained soldiers who have leveled become useless rapidly and making expensive new ones who come out at level 2 is worthless when all the heroes are above level 10.