As I joined this beta-project only a couple of week ago, I am not sure if this has already been discussed. Anyway, as the search function is not really helpfull I will open a new discussion.

As we approach a final implementation of the game the difficulty of balancing heroes magic and meleewise becomes obvious to me. Lets first consider the power of armies during the game:

At the start of the game a typical unit has 3 attack, 0 defense, 5 healthpoints and 1-2 attacks per turn.
In the midgame you are confronted with parties of lightly armord swordsmen: 4*18 attack = 72, 4*8 defense = 32, 4*6 healthpoints = 24 and 1-2 attacks per turn.
In the late game the armies consist typically of squads of armoured elite riders with medical paks: 10*30 attack = 300, 10*16 defense = 160 and 10*20 healthpoints = 200, and 2-3 attacks

Therefore the Power rating of an unit grows from the early game to late game by a factor of 100 to 1000.

To make champions and the souvereign actually balanced throughout the course of a game the power rating has to grow in a similar way. This is quite problematic! While champions gain some additional power by improving their equippment (neglecting casters for the moment), we still can not offset the fact, that the size of a unit grows by a factor of 20 from early to late game (and that units effectively level - by simply building more experienced troop - which offsets some of the leveling effects of champions. Annotation: in this regard i do not understand why regular troops do not level, and why we can not combine individual units to a party if we have the tech).

At the moment a Champion/Souvereign unit is balanced powerwise in the range of a party of units. The automatically results is that Souvereigns feel absolutely overpowered in the early game (when confronted with individual soldiers). This furthermore leads to the fact, that early game units are not very usefull, because a souvereign (if he acts first) can simply walk into a city and destroy all defending units. However when the same Souvereign is confronted by an Squad of units his preferred option is to run, and the player/AI has to be super carefull whith its heroes later on.

I want at this point take a look back at the system employed by master of magic concerning regular troops and heroes. There combat of a troop vs a hero worked like this:

E.g. The troop hat 4 attack per person, 4 defense per person and 2 hitpoints per person, while fielding 6 persons

The hero might have had 12 Attack, 12 Defense and 12 HP. So All its values were dramatically higher that that of an individuall troop (note this is not achievable in Elemental at the moment), but if the troops were added up, the troop would have double the defense and offense.

Now attack worked like this: The hero attacked and did an average of 4 damage [remember in MoM each attack and defense symbol hat a 30% chanceto inflict or avoind one damage, when neglecting hit (heroes typically hat 60%+ chance to inflict damage, through)] of these 4 damage the fists man in the unit can avoid 1 damage with his 4 defense and gets hit for 3 Damage, which kills him. The remaining 1 Point of damage is absorbed by the defense of the second unit. On the attack back, the army (which now has only 5 men) will do an combined damage of 5*4*0.3 which is 6. The heroes defense of 12 can cancel about 4 and he gets about 2 damage. Thus both have lost the same amount of health, while the values of the hero seem to be much less impressive. So this is based on the fact that in MoM each unit has to defend individually against attacks, giving single units with high defense an additional advantage.

If you additioally remember the leveling system you will note that a hero, from leveling alone typically doubled his attack, defense and hitpoints, while also at least doubling his chance to hit. To gain an similar strong increase in hero capabilities (by leveling) a Elemental-hero needs about to be level 25 or above. The power of regular troops, in contrast, did not increase that much because higher level units usually comprised even fewer soldiers that the 8 of the initial spearmen.

Suggestions for Elemental

To offest the problems discussed above several approaches could be taken:

- The single units of the early game could be replaced by groups or even squads, and the power level of souvereings increased accordingly. This would offset one of the facts that make units late game so powerfull. compared to champions.

- The increase of power obtained while leveling could be enhanced dramatically. The souvereign could, for instance, automatically gain more HitPoints per level. I would propose to set the champion hitpoints to (Level+2)*Constitution/2 (For a 10 Constitution hero 15 hitpoints to start, 60 hitpoints at level 10). This will also help souvereigns against magic, which should in endgame also do about several times the damage it does early on, to be actually usefull against squads. [Due to tactical speed it in fact does several times the damage form early on, but the additional mana cost is by far to high].

- Furthermore, combined units in Elemental should also defend inidvidually, so that onlay the defense of one soldier is used to counter an attack. The balance could further be changed in favour of champions, if units consisting of several soldiers attack individuallay. This means, that each attack of the squad has to defeat the champions defense individually. I am not sure if that is how Elemental handles combat, but the numbers shown in the interface indicate that the values for groups of soldiers are simply added up (if this is not the case then the inferface should be changed in some way to represent this).