I have read a lot of bellyaching about how the changes to the XP system have made it harder to level up heroes, make it less transparent, and generally made the game less fun. People are certainly entitled to their opinion, but as a veteran of strategy games since literally Universe, over the last 2 days I have had probably the most fun I've ever had with any strategy game in the last 15 years - not since Alpha Centauri. And this was with a losing game!
There are a lot of reasons, but the most important one has to do with the XP revamp. In E:WOM, and to a lesser extent with FE, I basically played the game like a true RPG - I basically never created units or built them except as a garrison for my cities. And I certainly never took them with me in the field -why should I? There were always plenty of heroes, and they leveled up so fast one could create a mighty stack of doom in no time and ravage the countryside.
In my most recent game (using .75), I finally started to discover the fun of using 'normal' units. I had begun to twig to their use in the .50 build of LH, and I didn't really understand why my stack of 3 heroes was upgrading at a snail's pace until I took a closer look at the list of changes in LH vs. FE. Suddenly I realized I was going to have to create - gasp! - 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 disparate armies - with different hero commanders and different goals!
And I found myself loving it.
See, I feel that the brilliance of the system is that it mimics real life and asks you to think strategically. Sure, anyone can create a stack of doom, and LH will certainly let you do that - in fact there are times when you must do just that - just don't expect much leveling! There have been numerous time when I've thought very carefully about the risk/reward of 'what's the minimum amount of force I need to take out this...' in order to get the most XP bang for the buck. I've thought about army grouping, rotating out normal units of 'tour of duties', making a careful analysis of which heroes I really need to level soon... which brings me to my second point of dissension: the apparent 'level cap' of heroes.
Love it!
Both a game that I'm playing now (an excellent game BTW!) - StarDrive - and a game that I had high hopes for - MOO3 - suffer from the same issue of technology rolling in seemingly every turn/2 minutes. When this occurs, differentiation is almost impossible - it becomes less about planning for the future as building the best thing that I can build at any given moment. With LH, I find myself planning out my heroes' ahead of time - I know what I want my hero to look like at level 5 or 10, of course changing for a fluid situation (Eclipse, anyone?) but the point is that I HAVE TO PLAN. I know I can't possibly get every technology/trait/spell book, so rather than be a jack-of-all-trades I have heroes that complement and specialize in certain things, again differentiating. In my last game, I had 2 Mage heroes - but they were very different: one was basically a spell master, who I used for offensive spells and to maintain enchantments. The other one was a summoning master - able to whip up Ice Elementals (and nastier things) at a moment's notice. In a world where heroes can have it all, there would have been no need to think carefully about who was suited to what; just go out there, bang some monster and ruffian heads and eventually you'd have 2 cloned heroes. With the current system, you don't - you have to make careful decisions! (Note: I play on Challenging/Normal, so there aren't hoards of monsters around - in some ways making the choices about who to send even more so!)
Now that's not to say there are not problems. Things like dragons giving out barely any XP is a problem. There also seems to be some inconsistency about what XP bonuses are given out - perhaps a note on the battle screen giving a range of possible total XP award for the battle? And in general there is not enough XP for high-level stacks (Deadly vs. Medium is especially an issue in my experience). You are already aware that hero skill trees have some balancing and adjusting work ahead.
But overall, Derek, Brad, and team, I feel this is absolutely the way to go in general. Please don't nerf the XP system or bring back the 'heroes can have it all' mechanic. Make us think about every army, every unit, every leveling decision. Make us think about who to send in the field and who needs to stay back at base. Make us consider carefully whether I really need 2 heroes in a stack - knowing it will kill the XP gain for my rapidly growing designed units. Make personnel decisions matter, and make death of these units really hurt.
In my opinion, you are way down that road. Please don't turn away from it!
-Steve
