I can found an empire! I can raise a city with my bare hands! I'm Immortal! I can ... slowly level my way to competence and maybe find a trinket or 2

Why are starting sovereigns so weak?

I never understood why Sovs start out so weak. I'm the damn progenitor of an entire race! I start an empire! I don't die! Why do I start with 20 hit points, maybe a rank or two of magic and if I'm lucky a rusty short sword. Why can anything other than the lowest tier critter eat me for lunch in the beginning.

How do i raise my hand and suddenly an entire city comes forth.. yet all I know is a few measly spells.

How can I not die, yet take grievous wounds and zap back to a city if I fall (unless I have no city.. and then i'm really dead).

WAY BACK, the story was that the sov was this demigod/god/badass who came to elemental to restore the world. Using essence to restore the land, specifically creating fertile ground to create settlements (maybe drawing in refugees from the countryside, maybe just creating them out of thin air). Being much more powerful than other "man-shaped entities" and the only repository of magic.

Then it all changed and I think it lost a lot of the compelling story.

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In my opinon it's great from the story-telling point of view that our sovereign starts so weak. What is not so great is that he/she stays mostly weak even at the end of the game. It would be great to take your sovereign from a normal being with a lot of potential at the start of the game to a demigod by the end of the same game.

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All demi-gods have to start somewhere... they are not raising hands and creating entire cities, they are creating small villages that contain small amounts of population and they have to build over many seasons even basic technologies such as gardens. The default intro text for your Sov mentions that for most of their life they were entirely unremarkable digging in a mine or something.

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AoW2, Shadow Magic, and MoM essentially made the sovereign a non-combat unit. In the AoW series you could put the sov in battle, but they didn't level and weren't strong at all. In both games they were the only units that seriously cast spells. This made them really special.

I don't think they want to go that far in LH, but it does seem there needs to be something inherently special about the sovereign. They are heroes with a head-start right now. I would be interested in ideas about how this could changed without radically altering the gameplay.

How about bringing back sovereign essence for some purpose, maybe to perform a limited number of "miracles" of some kind? They could be like sovereign-only spells, but not tied to the magic system. But call them something cool, like miracles. They could make cities more fertile, give more essence slots, make a resource appear, infuse champs or units with some kind of power, ect. Maybe they could focus on making certain aspects of the empire building stronger, research a technology instantly, or they could do devastating things in combat. That way your empire-building is more directly tied to the sovereign. "That's why that guy is in charge, he turns swamps in to gold mines."

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Yeah, it always cracks me up that a Sovereign can gain the ability to raise and lower land, summon powerful beings and generally be somewhat impressive in the magic realm, but can't channel/learn the magical prowess to fix simple injuries like a chipped tooth.

Or, figure out how to slip a chain shirt on without special training apparently...

Or, command other units to stand in front of the Sovereign, if he has a melee weapon. Oh, and on that note, a Sov can't figure out how to switch between bows and swords, something any 8 year old play acting can do. Yes, the throwing knives help a bit, but REALLY guys!

I'm sure all of these shortcomings are catalogued under 'game balance decisions', but this is why Sovs are less impressive than we were led to believe on the box art.

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