The only reason I consider levels "powerful" on champions is the access they grant to rare equipment and the emergency hp resivoir for when something unexpected/unfortunate happens.

Yeah, some of the leveling perks are nice, but very few of them are flat unbalanced, and the other stat gains from levels absolutely pale in comparison to the difference good equipment makes. Heck, even a level 1 champion with ideal gear can absolutely crush some pretty nasty monsters, and demolish troops.

I usually play normal or challenging. If you wander and cherry pick goodie huts and easy monster lairs, nothing harder than a banished ogre, wolves, ruffians, darklings, mites, rock spiderlings, you will equip yourself well enough that you can dominate groups of leather clad standard troops, with almost zero risk after the first couple upgrades.

I think pulling any equpiment at all from unguarded goodie huts should be exceptionally rare, or if you do it should mostly be utility survival equipment, such as the compass, telescope, monster repellent, mushrooms, etc. Weapons and armor should almost never happen, that stuff should be fought for, or researched & bought.

To clarify my OP, I intended this to be a skill or trait that all creatures would have. Most ordinary mobs would only have a base skill of 1, meaning they could only damage one figure in a unit at a time. Packs of mobs, such as a pack of wolves, mites, and other grouped creatures would be able to damage more than one unit because each figure in the unit could damage 1. Stronger mobs such as ogres, dragons, golems and the like would naturally have a higher rating in this skill, so they could damage multiple figures in a unit.

 By making this a base skill that everything has, it would help balance combat and greatly increase depth. This could also be a trait purchasable for trained units.  Of course, like many understood, this would be a skill common for warriors, and perhaps obtainable by defenders, assassins, and governors to varying degrees.

Dont forget that it would scale perfectly alongside the increasing figure count in trained units due to tech, because a champion would be leveling as the game progresses. It could also even be that warriors increase this skill automatically on levelup or every other level.

 Along with better balancing of weapons and armor, I believe this would make combat a lot more dynamic and make groups of mobs/units a bit more relevant.

Would there be the opposing idea too?  A group of twelve guys can't all hit one guy, they would get into each other's way?  I don't like either idea really.

From observation, it seems the Attack/Defense is calculated first and then the damage is multiplied by number of units. So a group of 5 with 8 Atk vs 8 Def will deal 10-20 damage (as per equal Atk and Def) rather than 16-33 damage (as per 40 atk vs 8 def).

Golems are useless in the endgame, because they cannot equip magic armor. There is no upgraded version of golem like the obsidian one - basically one needs to design a unit with high defense and a simple weapon like the boar spear or - even better - one with elemental damage. A few levels later and this normal unit can kill high level heroes without gear - the AI tends to leave them quite naked.

I used im my game as Gilden a single unit model - armored horsemen. I think I lost one unit, and the fights included dragons and epic quests.

The AI keep sending armies that are beaten without a problem, leveling the units in the process.

Storm dragons are pathetic for an endgame unit. I even used my old 5 men squads instead of new units with the golem shield and so on, because they were invulnerable already at level 20.

We need more endgame units, and stronger monsters in the wildlands. And don't get me started about tactical spells versus the braindead AI ...