NPC benefits

I'm pretty sure it is:

20% food applies to the city the champion is in

Prestige is broken (except on sovereign)

10% production I really don't know, I assume it's either materials or broken since nothing speeds up construction time (very irritating)

Most either apply to the city they are stationed in, don't require you to do anything, or don't work: Bards and Royalty don't seem to work, Merchants don't need to be stationed to gain income, Administrators need to be stationed for the 10% construction bonus.

You may want to check out the "Abilities and Traits Mod" or see Heavenfall's "Hotfix" fixes. They fix or improve the abilities quite a bit.

I still like my idea of higher level champions giving a bigger bonus.  Gives you an 'excuse' to put them at risk in the wild for a bit before 'retiring' them to a desk job.

For example, an Administrator gives a 10% bonus currently.  For every level above 1, he would provide an additional 1% bonus.  It's not game breaking, and would make your higher level champions a little more interesting.

I completely agree. Once Stardock allows <Calculate> work for traits and ability bonuses we'll be golden. I promise you.

James, what is wrong with Calculate on those? I am almost certain calculate can work on any "<GameModifier>" "<Value>"

This idea is interesting and would give you more individuality to the champs once they are just part of a garrision.  I would still prefer that they didnt give their bonus until they are in a city though (to give you a choice to make).

Maybe this has been updated in a recent patch without my knowledge, I haven't tested it recently.

<Calculate> has been a static variable for spells only, it hasn't worked for dynamic things (ie. updating every turn) like traits and ability bonuses; a dev has even confirmed this for me twice. Frankly, it just doesn't do anything for abilities. Last I checked, a Merchant cannot <Calculate> his gold income per turn yet.

It's because those abilities aren't rechecked every turn. In general, stuff that have a "use" can use calculate, because you can just calculate that at the time of use. So I'm pretty sure you can use calculate on active abilities, then again, those are just spells anyways.

Passive abilities only works with static values, because otherwise, you'd have to mimic this by "reusing" them over and over to recalculate values.  You'd end up doing tons of calculations for every ability every char every turn. It's not really an ideal solution.

The thing is not every character and every ability needs to be re-calculated every turn. It could be implemented in such a way that it is only calculated on a level up or ability increase. Furthermore, I don't think it should be a huge processor tax on the game to calculate 100 or even 500 more calculations per turn, the gamespeed slowdown should be nominal. Computers should be able to calculate large amounts of data every second and a few CHARISMA+INTELLIGENCE=GILDAR shouldn't really mess everything up. Besides, not every profession even needs to have someone calculated for them, I'd stick to just Merchants, Scientists, and Administrators.

It's something I'd be interested to test if they implemented it.

You might think that's true for what you plan to use it for. However, adding calculate to abilities has much farther reaching implications. Just about any ability have to be checked to see if it needs recalculation, even if it actually doesn't. Even totally random, non hero unit abilities that never needs to. Which could get out of hand real quick if they plan to add more special abilities.

Oh, and if you're talking about calculate on level up or ability increase, then you're also adding duration timers and triggers to the process (which actually makes it more complicated than just a per turn recalculate). It would be easier to have abilities be able to upgrade like buildings than to use calculate in that manner.