Frogboy
The Legendary Heroes
In Fallen Enchantress, your ability to acquire champions (which led to your victory or defeat often times) was dependent on how the map placed the champions at the start of the game. You literally would find them camping out in the wilds. This had the tendency of making victory less about how powerful your civilization was and more about amassing champions. In fact, some players were able to win the game without ever building cities.
(Taken from journal)
This is the reason I posted this- I literally soloed the game with my sovereign, but suddenly Frogboy comes and say that they are useful, so I started wondering- what the hell is he talking about?
Sure, the normal game is easy enough (playing on expert, which reveal all kind of design problems). But amassing champions? Losing games because you didn't find enough of them? The only champions I have ever recruited were either sacrificial lambs for their magic, or they returned their cost with +gold, +research and such.
The problem with champion stacking and turning into a stack of doom is that they thought it causes balance problems. In truth, they were dead wrong, as one strong caster can wipe out entire armies in a couple of turns.
My experience is much closer to Frogboy's than it is to yours. The games where I did best were the ones where I picked up as many heroes as possible and distributed them around with decent armies racking up experience. The games where I struggled were ones where I only had my sov and the starting champion.
One of the beautiful things about FE (and WoM) is that you can play it any number of ways and still succeed. However, as you experienced, being able to win any way you play kinda takes the fun out of winning. Not sure what they can do about that. Nor what they can do out of players min-maxing the game to death. As Frogboy pointed out, kiting with potions is a winning strategy, but not something you'd want the AI to do to you.
I haven't had much chance to play with LH (just enough to make sure it works -- and learn that I should not have started on Hard), but it seems obvious to me that there's going to need to be a lot of balancing. If people are feeling that heroes are too weak in LH, it's probably a good thing as they removed a lot of the good loot to make heroes weaker (and leveling more important) in FE.
I for one am sick of kitting my champions out with rusty swords and discarded helmets.
