I am spending a lot of time breaking from playing to comment, especially on that unrecruitable champions thing.  I saw a couple Stardock official replies to -other- threads (oddly not the one I made specifically targetting it) that it is partially a new feature, partially a bug -- previously, you could recruit any hero from the getgo, but higher level heroes would simply cost more (the SD official indicated this was based on their level above yours, but in actual gameplay, it was my experience they did not go down in price even as your level increased).  The 'bug' portion is they did not intend for this to be a big mystery, and there should be a disabled recruit button you could use that gives the reason why, like would happen in 1.07 if you  clicked on a hero, went to the Action tab but lacked the gold they demanded -- there would be a disabled recruit icon there that would indicate you did not have enough gold.

Anyway, I intended to make this thread to throw out a couple comments on a change in strategy required for 1.08 because of the significant changes made to income and cost.  You now get only half the gold from battles, so its harder to get gold (though another official SD thread indicated there are more gold resources; I managed to snub one near an AI's first settlement before their borders extended there ).  I think this could help make regular non-hero troops more useful ... instead of just letting monsters roam near your settlements, send your guard troops out to intercept.  Because each battle gives less gold, you need to battle more, so use your non-hero troops as well.

In anticipation of economic hardship due to buildings costing more maintenance, and reinforced by discovering battles only give half the gold, I think the 'Thief' trait for your sov is all the more valuable, and of course seeking to recruit thief NPCs.  It doesn't fully make up for the gold loss -- if you were to get 100 gold from a battle before, the 50% rate now puts it at 50 and a thief giving a 50% bonus gives 50% of that 50 gold, or 25 gold bonus for a total of 75 as [(X - 50%) + 50%] will always be less than X, contrary to popular belief.  The +1 Gildar/Arcane/Research heroes hold their value a lot longer now, as they generate those points maintenance-free even though they don't get improved by city % bonuses even when stationed in cities.

I still am not 100% sure on how trade caravans work, but they seem to generate food production bonuses in both the sending AND receiving cities (can anyone tell me for certain whether this is true?).  If that is true, then with food becoming a more precious resource due to some buildings now requiring food that didn't before, it would behoove players to carefully plan their cities and trade routes to maximize this by sending trade caravans between major food producing cities (not just the +1 food enchantment), and sending caravans from the 1-enchantment-only cities to major food producing cities so the % bonus on the receiving city's end at least grants more overall food.