What Makes a Good Hero?

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

The Epic Heroes mod might provide some good material. The heroes in it might be a little more powerful than you want, but they're all interesting.

I hated something in this mod, though: Almost every nation had wizard heroes, but if you're the one with a warrior kind (Arco's elephant), it's really bad. I wouldn't recommend these.

In my opinion you need one of these:
-a thematic special ability (immortal for Ulm vampires, stealthy or assassin, sqtandard, good researcher, even patrol bonus),
-an otherwise unobtainable magic path or H3/4,
-boosting a strong chassis (van/giant) - for fighter chassis, add an aura or magic item to make it worthwhile
-autosummons
-recycle an existing monster theme or summons to give a thug to a nation that lacks recruitables (I always thought that Asterion the minotaur was a cool idea for Arco, even though his combat stats are not that good - T'ien Ch'i could have a Celestial Servant hero too)

[Agema]

My idea of what makes a bad hero are the likes of Farbaute the Einhere (Vanheim), or Bernlad the Green Knight (Man). They essentially present you with a slightly boosted basic trooptype. Sure, you can theoretically equip them to usefulness, but you'd be far better off spending a few more gems summoning a decent thug chassis (arguably you could be spending less on a summon, as with a sturdier unit like a Banelord you wouldn't need to use as many gems to compensate for so many weaknesses.)

There are some non-magical heroes that are useful outside the frontline. A hero with, say, the Standard ability is useful to keep your units' morale up, not necessarily fighting themselves. Some, like for instance Sporsnjall (Jotunheim), summon units, and in his case both he and his somewhat feeble summons are also stealthy. In some extremely niche uses, there's some Man heroine (Rhiannon?) with a Patrol bonus. None of these guys will put a smile on your face if they turn up, but at least they have some reasonable functionality.

[Illuminated One]

Hmm, I disagree about limiting human heroes more than supernatural beings.

There are mythological human heroes that won against SC gods or would qualify as thugs. For example Siegfried or Perseus.
Besides combat heroes make little sense if they are only a beefed up normal unit.

You could make these extremely rare though.

[analytic_kernel]

AFAIK, you can't control the rarity of particular hero events. In one of the "heroes" threads that I read, someone suggested that there seemed to be a preference for certain kinds of heroes given certain scales. But, I never saw any statistically-significant evidence or anyone's analysis of Dominions code to support this or any other kind of preference or weighting.

I think maybe Illuminated just meant that one should create "superhumans" sparingly in mods.

[Frozen Lama]

another awesome hero attribute (the one i like about Lugh the most) is a forge bonus.

[Trumanator]

Can you really make a hero more or less "rare"? Obviously you can decide not to make them multiheroes, but that doesn't effect the likelihood of their showing up, right?

[Sombre]

With the Lizardmen mod, I intended to add some weaker heroes to balance out the really amazing ones. So for every ubermage demigod you get, there are other games where you'll get the incredibly stealthy scout guy. Of course I wouldn't go making any heroes worthless, but you can certainly make amazing ones rarer by adding more average or below average ones to the same nation, along with multiheroes that aren't anything special.

[Agema]

Oh, I don't know. The EH fighter heroes get you expanding very rapidly: at least, Beowulf can take pretty much any non-trampler indies straight away (might need to be a little circumspect about heavy cavalry too), and would have a decent chance of defeating an early SC if you get rushed. You wouldn't want to take most of the mage heroes expanding, as they need to research necessary spells to be effective.

By and large, the EH heroes seem a bit too tough for an ordinary national hero, though.

[analytic_kernel]

Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts.

I detected some recurring themes in the responses, such as mage heroes who provide a magic path that is unnatural for a nation. I will try to follow some of these suggestions in the mod that I'm working on.

[sector24]

I think if you want heroes good enough to warrant taking luck scales, they have to redefine the nation in some way. Things that do that are:

New magic path(s) or ability to forge new boosters
Forge bonus for non-earth nation
Stealthy preacher, or L3 holy for a nation with weak priests
Assassin with good default equipment
Hero that attracts chaff units each turn
etc.

For a slightly boosted human hero, most of the time I'd rather have someone with high leadership/high movement and possibly a standard to boost morale. Human units are just going to die, it's not very useful to have a hero who is basically an inefficient thug. Hope this helps.