(Sorry to hijack this post) Are there many techs that raise essence globally? The only ones I've gotten to are ones that increase essence by a percentage (which of course is useless if all your units have zero essence).
I mean the Imbue spell costs 3 essence to cast (permanently deducts it from your essence attribute and gives it to another hero). If you start out with 10 essence, you can cast it three times on another hero(s), giving nine essence to that hero(s), leaving 1 for your sovereign. You can then add to it when you level up, which when I did it, brings you back up from 1 to 4 (I don't know why it added three, but it does). Repeat.
True, but make sure your essence is a multiple of 3, so you don't wind up with a useless 1 point of mana leftover on your sovereign. :)
Since the sovereign is the only caster, I usually give him high int and wis (which I think corresponds to essence?). It seems like a waste to mix with melee attributes (str, dex, con), since you'll soon recruit a bunch of heroes that can't do anything but melee. Charisma is not that useful, either, since trained units are generally more powerful than recruited heroes. Just my current strategy anyway... I hope I have to change it soon with patched changes!
Might as well add my thoughts: Heroes are really boring. They are all basically the same. The only mage is your sovereign or whoever else you donate your sovereign's essence to). All the other heroes are melee by default. Usually their bonus is +1 to resource, gold, or research, which is worthless for the battlefield. Maybe make half the heroes "civilian" that benefit production to the town they are stationed in (like farmers), and the other half be milit