In general hero development is fun, I wandering around the world smashing monsters and enemy cities with my sovereign. I also like picking new traits and decking him out with cool loot. I think there is room for improvement though.
* When selecting a trait, trait-trees should be accessible. The tree should at least be in the doc. For instance for a while I ignored the quick until I figured out it was actually a tree. Also it should show all the spells you get from selecting a magic skill, e.g. muti-domain spells. File this under informed decision making. All information relevant to a decision should be accessible at the point in time of the decision.
* I like the rare, common/uncommon flags by the way. It seems that 4th level class specialization should have different flags though, maybe 4th level option only, something to let noobs know they won’t see another class option later.
* The administrator path needs to be rethought a little, it is no fun for me to plant heroes in cities and not have them off fighting and adventuring. Even ignoring the fun factor it isn’t profitable either since they won’t level.. yeah, there is the adventurers guild, but that is too late in the game and expensive to be much use… I’ve beaten games before I’ve got one of those things built before…. hopefully AI improvements will make for longer games but still. I like the idea of rare* dedicated city administrators, which do various cool thins. By rare I mean not enough even for all your important cities to have one. But I feel these should be completely separate from regular champions. Then they are pure cool factor, rather than hrm seems kindof a waste to plant this guy in a city the whole game.
* The defender option seems underpowered to me, but maybe I just haven’t see their cool powers. Anyone a fan of going this route?
* In general hero development seems too weighted towards making melee fighters, the only effective pure mage build I’m aware of is the fire mage, which seems a little counter intuitive given the lore of the sovereign being a powerful mage.
When building a fire mage a pet peeve often having them know more than 1 school of magic is counter productive even when they come for free e.g. finding /buying a book that teaches you a basic level of a school… let me explain:
1. It is better to get a few skills at high levels vs lots of low level skills
2. The options you get are random, but not completely random
3. There appears to be at least some bias towards improving skills you have already learned.
* The only school of magic that gets any real & reliable benefit from the more damage traits is fire, maybe death(haven’t played much with them)
* In general I think magic school upgrades should improve existing spells not just give you access to new spells.
* There just don't seem like enough summon spells for a pure summoner mage to be a viable option.
