One possibility I was wondering about with Tame is to only make it work on beasts which are equal to or lower level than the caster. That would still make it useful, just not quite so overpowered at the start of the game.

Another VERY interesting idea!

It could follow to reason then that there could be traits that improve the tame level above the casters....in a Druid trait tree.  

Or have a beastmaster setup.

Something for a Ranger class maybe. Nature focused skills like tame, scout(for whole army), and ranged perks? Ultimate skill would be dragon tamer...

Another thing I'd like to see:

Have all the tiles' yields at starting points total up to 9.  I don't care how many tiles with yields there are, or what their exact allocation is, as long as they each add up to 9.  2/4/3, 3/3/3, 5/3/1, 4/3/2, all those are fine.  I don't want to see a starting area with only 2 tiles with yields and they're both 2/3/0.  I know I can just hit Ctrl-N until I get a 9er, but I also know that my AI opponents might be getting stuck with those 2/3/0s.

I'm not saying there should be a 9er at every potential city location, just the ones that players start at.  At the very least, have one 9er at each starting point, preferably the tile your sovereign starts on.

If the AI doesn't get a good spot to start of with, it just adds +1/+1/+1 to the tile as the city settles.

Gotta love AI.

I'm revisiting this after playing another game or two, and as the developers are asking for ideas to work on. So the revised list:

1) Make it impossible to cast Cull the Weak on summoned units (or make it only castable on Trained units, like Deathlash), to stop the Skeleton Horde free mana tactic.

2) Make it worthwhile to get Summon Delin. E.g. get rid of the turn limit, reduce the mana.

3) Don't make Maul on prone units a 100% kill regardless of hit points. I don't mind the exact mechanism, I believe there is at least one mod which does this.

4) Make roadbuilding cost 1 movement point. I've revised my opinion slightly, it's not ludicrously OP, but it still just feels a bit weird that it apparently takes no time at all.

5) Make Hunter +100% vs. Beasts, not +50%. It's a pretty marginal bonus at the moment.

6) Nerf Beastlord somewhat. Make it only usable on monsters which are same level or lower; or don't give experience as well as the free monster; or give 1/2 expererience; or increase the mana cost. Currently it's pretty easy to build a powerful army very early in the game, and personally I think it's over the top.

7) Make Consume Shard give 100 mana rather than 200. It seems pretty much a no-brainer now for any shard you can see which you can't build on in the near future. Make it more of a difficult tradeoff between getting ahead now and giving up mana later.

8) Fix the queuing pioneer exploit. Several ideas have been proposed, I don't mind much which is used.

I've actually changed my mind somewhat on Heart of Fire. The high mana cost makes it difficult to cast in the early game, and later it is very useful to kill those stupidly high armour AI units. If this is just what you're supposed to do with a fortress with high essence, then fine I guess- as long as the AI does it too! Hopefully this will happen now that the AI is being improved.

#1 your logic is flawed. We do not need complete removal of tactics, so if it's too good, lower the mana gained, not remove it completely. 

#2 Delin should be powerful During those turns. If he lacks, buff him during those turns, and leave his "turn timer", it makes him different and more interesting than the regular summons. 

#3 No comments here.

#4 It's a perk for capitar, and with them gaining no active abilities, I don't see this as an issue at all.

#5 Removing Beastlord and merging it to a hunter chance or ability would work better. I agree it's kinda silly atm.

#6 See #5

#7 I disagree, depending on the shard 200 mana is very hurtful compared to losing it forever.

#8 No Disagreement there, I don't use it either way.  

Last comment: Glad you see sense

Actually, I'd tend to agree with preventing the casting of Cull the Weak on summoned units. The ability to gain 130 or so mana every battle by summoning a bunch of skeletons and culling them is a little ridiculous. I don't mind the ability to cull the single-unit summons where you aren't going to do much better than break even on the spell cost as much. Perhaps Cull the Weak shouldn't grant mana when used on summoned units, or should grant no more than the amount of mana it took to summon the unit when used on summoned creatures. In my opinion, the current form of Cull the Weak is fine for use on trained units and tamed creatures or (semi)irreplaceable summons (e.g. Sand Golems) because there's an obvious cost to doing so, but it's silly to be able to summon things tactically and recover most of the spell cost by culling them before the battle ends, or summon a horde of Skeletons and have more mana coming out of the battle than you had when you went into it. It's not an exploit I use, but it is one I think is a bit too ridiculous.

Personally, I don't think that Consume Shard is worth using under most circumstances anyways. But I tend to plan for longer games anyways, and I like having magic be as powerful as possible, so trading magic enhancement for mana isn't that appealing to me. Besides which, I tend to have plenty of mana without destroying shards.

I disagree with removing Beastlord, as it's a more enjoyable summoner-style magic user than the Summoner profession is (in my opinion). I would not completely disagree with nerfing it to only be able to tame equal or lower level monsters, increasing the mana cost, or making Tame easier to resist, but I wouldn't want Beastlord removed. As for reducing the experience gain for taming creatures as opposed to killing them: maybe, but I tend to find it fairly difficult to level a reasonable number of heroes up anyways, and most beasts will only take you so far into the game. Similarly, I agree that Hunter needs something, but I don't think that merging it and Beastlord is really that good of an idea even if Beastlord gets knocked back a little.

From the XML, Summon Delin is only active for three turns and costs 500 mana, takes two turns to cast, and can only be cast in battle. Even if Delin is extraordinarily powerful, I don't see how he's better than ~12 Blizzards for the same mana cost (and on a good damage mage, 12 Blizzards is essentially 12 armies destroyed). Moreover, even were the mana cost something more reasonable, he'd have to be truly exceptional to do something particularly worthwhile in the only three turns he's on the field. It's true he can probably kill three units in those three turns, or get off one fireball and kill a couple of units, but by the same token I could have spent far less mana casting Blizzard and killed the entire army outright. I could see Delin perhaps being worthwhile as a summonable superchampion, although then you'd need to revise the Fire side of the summoning tree, but as he stands I really don't see any reason to use him over casting Fireballs or Blizzards unless you really, really need a tank that's going to disappear three turns down the road. However, this is all based on looking at the XML, as I don't particularly care for the way in which summoning is handled in FE:LH, so I rarely use it, and I don't think I've ever developed it all the way to either end of the summoning branch of the Mage tree.

I would like for there to be a fixed cap on the number of times Maul can hit. I can see a bear getting off a few attacks before everyone else in the area reacts, and I could understand initiative penalties or applying the 'Dazed' effect to mauled units, but I can't understand a whole army standing around watching as a bear makes 5-10 attacks in a row on a single unit. I would say that capping the number of attacks to four or five would be reasonable - it's still powerful, but it's not as ridiculous as some of the attack strings can be currently. That, or I'd make it into an active ability so that even if you can use it to kill off a prone unit, you can't use Maul over and over again to repeatedly take down things which ought to be tough using just a single bear cub and a few accuracy bonuses.

My only concern with Cull The Weak is in relation to Skeletal Horde.  Outside of that, I think it's fine as is.  I think the fix is to make it so you can't use it on Undead.  With other summoned units, it's not really abusable.

Personally, the change I'd like to see to Tame is to both add 1 casting time, and increase the mana cost.  Adding the casting time would greatly reduce the ability to tame extremely powerful beasts early game (which is where Tame is really overpowered), as it would give them an opportunity to kill your sovereign before it goes off.  Even with that, I'd still like to see the mana cost increased a little (maybe just to 50).  Those two nerfs both in mind, I'd also like to see the cooldown reduced to 5 turns.  It's easy enough to wait out the 10 turns to tame another beast, but it's very boring.  I would not like to see Tame become more resistible because then it's more of a gamble, and I don't like leaving my success up to chance.

I agree with joeball on Consume Shard.  I'd rather have shard.  I'd only cast it if desperate.

As for Maul, I think Parrotmath's Maul mod should be implemented.  His solution is to decrease accuracy by 10%, and also by a flat 10.  So, if your bear has an accuracy of 89 on its first attack, the next attack would have an accuracy of 70, and the next would have 53, then 38, 24, 12, 1, and finally 0 (or as the math comes out, -9).  This method still allows the bear to get a few hits off, but doesn't allow it to get ridiculous when accuracy bonuses are applied.

Thanks for the feedback. I make that:

1) All four of us think casting Cull the Weak on Summon Skeleton Horde is a stupid way to get lots of mana, although there is some disagreement on what the fix should be. One person thinks Cull the Weak mana should be reduced in general. Two people think it should be banned for summoned units. One person thinks it should be banned for undead units. I go with banning it for skeletons rather than reducing the mana gained, but I don't mind exactly how you ban it for skeletons. (What I find weird about Cull the Weak in general is that Deathlash (which is nearly useless, in my experience) can only be cast on Trained units, so it's not like they didn't think of the problem, yet left it out for Cull the Weak, which seems much more overpowered to me.)

2) sjaminei thinks Delin should be made more powerful during his three turns. I'm afraid I have to disagree here. joeball has put the arguments well, but to summarise: 500 mana and two turns to cast a spell which may kill three units? Are you kidding me? Why on earth would you ever cast that? There are so many better options if you've got 500 mana for tactical spells I wouldn't know where to start. It's also completely useless compared to the far lower cost Summon Grave Elemental, which if you arrange your units correctly gives most of your army several turns of resurrection (Death Ward), plus one more unit from the Grave Elemental special ability. At the very least the Delin turn limit needs to go up and the mana cost needs to go down.

3) There seems to be agreement that Parrotmath's version of maul would be better than the current version. This would also reduce the power of Beastlord somewhat, as a Cave Bear army is a very scary thing if you can knock units prone or give the bears accuracy bonuses.

4) People clearly don't feel as strongly about roadbuilding as I do. Incidentally it's not really a "perk" for Capitar, you can get it easily by making your first hero a Commander, and it's debatable how much more useful two roadbuilding units are compared to one. My main point though is that it just seems a bit bizarre that roadbuilding takes zero time. A unit can walk as fast as it can build roads? Really?

5) No-one has actually objected to making Hunter +100% vs. Beasts rather than +50%. It's just so much less useful than any of the other profession bonuses. For me, a Hunter should be able to more or less solo Beasts of the right level from the start, and that's not really possible at the moment.  +100% would make it much more useful

6) Everyone seems to think Tame is at least a little overpowered, although there is some disagreement on best way to nerf it. Increasing the mana cost might be the simplest way to stop it being abused by Beastlords early on. I don't personally agree with the idea of eliminating Beastlord, it's quite a fun way to play, I just don't like the way at the moment if you're a Beastlord you can almost forget about strategy other than Taming as many animals as possible as quickly as possible.

7) People clearly don't think Consume Shard is as much of a no-brainer as I do! You are of course all wrong, , but I will bow to the majority. To see its effectiveness, I would recommend trying a Mage Magnar strategy with consuming non Fire/ Death shards whenever you can actually use the mana. Basically if you can use Consume Shard to win more battles with your sovereign, then you are well on your way to winning; you level up, you get better loot, you get better access to city sites, etc. etc. I only used it when I really needed to win a battle (e.g. against the AI, to beat a lair that was standing in the way of a good city site), but in practice I only found I needed to use about 100 of the 200 mana. Early on in the game you're gaining +1 mana from that shard, and you're probably not gaining any dramatic benefit from a non fire, non death shard. Compare that to +200 mana and a significant development advantage, and it really doesn't seem a very tough choice to me. As long as you gain access to a city site with Essence and/ or a new shard as a result of your battle, you must surely be ahead. There is an argument for making it give even less than 100, but I think 100 would be fine, it would still allow you to win an extra battle when you really needed it.

8) Everyone thinks the Pioneer / growth mechanism is stupid.

Here's hoping some of the more glaring balance problems can be fixed at some point.

The problem with something like Consume Shard is that it's a trade-off. You can have some mana right now, or you can have lots of mana and a bit of extra magical power later. Some people will think that the mana right now is more useful than the rewards further down the line, and other people view the long-term benefits of holding a Shard as more useful than the short-term benefit of having a lot of mana right now. I hold the longer view, you appear to favor the shorter view. In some ways, nerfing Consume Shard isn't a big deal to me because I'm not going to use it most of the time anyways, because I feel that at the point in the game when 200 mana is actually worth something is the same point in the game where your mage is generally too weak to do anything useful with it, and if you're running out of mana later in the game you're either desperate or you have way too many strategic unit enchantments and summons active (or you're trying to use too many spells with too many spellcasters in too many battles in too short a time frame). Of course, if it were changed to produce less mana than it does currently, then I would be even less likely to ever use the spell, and I'd have to be even more desperate to start considering using it.

I think Darxim's suggestion of a 1-turn casting time is better than just increasing the mana. As s/he said, at least that way there's a greater risk to going after the stronger monsters early on. Increasing the mana cost slows me down a bit. Increasing the casting time means that I actually have to be able to survive next to whatever creature I'm trying to tame for a turn.

With regards to road building and how much time it takes to do it: armies move extremely slowly relative to the apparent size of the cities and rivers in the game (either that, or the rivers are more than 200 miles or 320 km wide and a city spanning just a 4-tile square is something like 500 miles or 800 km on a side, assuming that army movement is anything at all similar to medieval movement rates). Medieval and classical armies could be expected to travel 10-20 miles (16-32 km) per day on average while marching, depending on road quality, weather, and how much of a siege train and supply train they brought with them. Even going with 10 miles per day and using only half of the days in a turn for marching (roughly 45 days out of 90, using a three month season), you still have roughly enough time to march from Southern England to Northern Scotland in a turn (approximately 500 miles or 800 km) just as an example, which clearly isn't equivalent to what goes on in-game. If you wanted to have your vision of armies building roads as quickly as they marched dispelled, there you go - your armies clearly aren't spending anywhere close to half their time marching, unless they average less than 1 mile or 1.6 km per day on a full day of marching.

Alternatively, I'm reasonably certain I can find you some Looney Toons cartoons which "prove" that roads can be built as quickly as the builder can walk, if you'd like a less rational argument than the one given above. But anyways, there you go - a counterargument based on reality against your complaint about the unrealistic ability to create roads as quickly as your armies can move.

I agree that doubling the bonus would make it more useful, but I wouldn't be certain that it would make it much more useful. Beasts just aren't usually that big of a problem, and if I'm trying for a champion that can solo enemies without using mana I'd rather go for Might and Cruel and pick a different profession, since early on Might and Cruel represents a nearly free bonus of roughly 50% to your damage against anything (granted, it increases unrest by 5 in your empire, and prevents other weakness/strength pairings to get a different extra trait, but the trade-off on choosing a weakness/strength pairing is roughly the same opportunity cost as picking a profession, so that's essentially a wash) and remain somewhat useful to a direct combat sovereign later in the game, whereas the utility of the damage bonus against beasts that Hunter provides essentially disappears by mid-game. I would say that Hunter has more need of a secondary bonus than of improvements to the primary bonus.

Some secondary bonuses that I think could be thematically appropriate:

1. Reduced wages for the Hunter's army
2. Better income for killing Beasts (whether this means more animal parts recovered after the battle, or better sale price for animal parts, or more valuable versions of the animal parts get recovered by the Hunter, or just a gold bounty per killed Beast doesn't matter to me, but some kind of thematic bonus for hunting)
3. A (small) food bonus in the capitol or throughout the empire
4. Reduced initiative penalties when the Hunter is using a bow
5. The ability to train a limited number of low- or no-maintenance hunting dogs to serve as an early army supplement; the hunting dogs would also have bonuses against beasts (this could be any type of animal, I'm saying dogs because there's already a dog model in the game which is barely used and because they're a relatively common animal to use when hunting large animals)

I agree with Joeball that even at 100% the Hunter would still be pretty awful.  That, Adventurer, and Bandit Lord are the three professions I would never consider playing with, as all three are pretty awful.  If Hunter applied the 100% bonus to all of your units, then it would be good, because then it would help you expand and level early game, which would be good for the springboard effect (that's when you make a good foundation for increasing in power and then, when ready, your power level jumps; you just have to hope no one attacks you before you're ready).

I think the Adventurer profession should gain more fame per quest, and bonus experience per quest.  It would still be pretty weak, but at least it would be a little better.  Maybe a health bonus, as well.

I think Recruit Bandit's cost should be reduced to 10 gildar.  25 is way too much.  Honestly, I'm not sure it's worthwhile at 10.  Bandits are pretty weak, and not that plentiful.

Maybe the Hunter profession should have a special bow ability along with the damage bonus vs beasts.

I've messed around with modding a similar idea I call Hunter's Mark, which is an ability that requires a bow to use, giving the caster +50 Accuracy, +50% damage, +25 Crit Chance, and +1 Crit Damage Multiplier during their next action.  So basically you would sacrifice an action to get an accurate, powerful, and potentially extremely crippling shot off.  I actually gave this ability to all Tarth, but it would work just as well with the Hunter sovereign profession.

I really like joeball's suggestions that Hunter's could train dogs and/ or get e.g. twice as many body parts from killing Beasts. They both seem thematic, fairly easy to implement, and make being a Hunter at least slightly worthwhile, especially in the early game (which is so important).

The Hunter could start with two Anna-like dogs, like how the Bandit Lord starts with two bandits.  It would still need something else, but that would be pretty good.

Actually, now that I look at the Diplomat, Silver Tongue costs 100 gildar and has a 99 turn cooldown (so you can basically only use it once per combat).  I wouldn't play the Diplomat, either.  Silver Tongue's cost should at least be halved.

I'm currently playing as Karavox, and being able to convert Trained Units for 100 gold does seem powerful, but in practice I haven't had the chance yet in my current game. It's also not relevant unless you're actually fighting the AI, and I assume you have to pay wages to the converted unit, which makes it much less game changing than Tame. Also you have to expose your sovereign, which is dangerous against high level AI Trained units, so I assume this means waiting till the end of the battle and then converting one of the last surviving AI units.

Having said that, I am now fighting the AI, and I can see how converting a powerful AI Trained unit could help win a battle and then give you a better Stack of Doom after. I'm curious to see what happens to the AI unit's level and special abilities after converting them; when you tame Beasts they seem to revert to default level, for example. I want to give it a try, but 100 gold is quite a lot in a tight game. In practice I doubt I'll have the gold to convert more than one or two units in my current war.

Being able to convert cities for 1000 gold is fun but I can't remember ever having 1000 spare gold. I can understand why it's so high, but this just seems more of a power gamer thing for completists than a practical special ability.

Better trades is definitely worth having.

All in all Diplomat seems much better than the incredibly wimpy +50% Hunter damage vs. Beasts.