I haven't played much in a while, but the thing that used to make that happen for me was not having enough gildar to recruit the champion. You also might be having problems because of a very low Charisma, and I think it's possible to design a custom sov with extra points for being a weaker recruiter.

Play as a bard and max Charisma to 15 at startup. When your sov levels, put points into Charisma. You then have a likeable dude who hires champions for cheap AND he/she can quickly raise cities to level 3. I call it my "Slick Willie" Bill Clinton strategy and it works.

Hmm.

• What version # are you playing?
• I remember in previous versions there were unhirable "Champions" but that was probably pre 1.1. I haven't seen that issue for awhile.
• If the hero is inside your zone of control (ZOC) then you should be able to mouse over the recruit button and it should say how much gildar it costs to hire them
• If the hero is outside your ZOC, then you need a unit next to them to speak with them. Do the same thing and mouse over the recruit button to see the gildar costs.

It sounds like you're playing an older version of the game where unhirable Champions were running around. Just a hunch.

Oh god, just found out what's wrong. When it installed 1.1 it didn't override my old 1.0, I was still playing 1.0. It instead installed 1.1 to a different directory. Haha. Thanks for the help.