I think it should be made free as well.

^ This. I have actually stopped taking the Organized trait because it's really Over-Powered. Why is the +1 movement trait 15 pick points, but Organized, which is EONS more powerful (especially if you're Men and drop the 10 gold in the beginning to get Travelling Boots on T2) costs only 10?

Make it cost 20. Make people really sacrifice for this advantage.

Hell, remove it completely, give a reason to give your soldiers travelers cloaks or mounts if you want the stuff to move that fast.

I think it should be made more expensive. I like having it in the game for those who want it, but it's a very powerful ability and should cost more for those who want to build a strategy around it.

I wanted to talk about this.

Considering that your sovereign will die in enemy territory and that causes the game to end, your response shouldn't be "Then I need my sovereign to be more powerful". It should be "I need to keep my sovereign out of enemy territory". Better/more powerful champions, a family line with channeler kids, splitting your sov's essence to the champions, these are all viable strategies that are actually far more useful.

No one uses them. Why? Because Organized makes your Sovereign enable Blitzkrieg.

Why bother with Cavalry or scout-type units that can move rapidly? You can just load your sov up with a bunch of archers and obliterate all opposition before they can even approach in Tactical combat.

I see a lot of complaining about Champions not being worth hiring -- I would be willing to wager most of those people are using Organized every single time. If you don't have Organized, then Champions are incredibly useful because they keep your Sovereign out of harm's way during wars.

Speaking of Champions: If a Champion has a trait that requires mana, I don't care about the "Sov's are supposed to be channelers and all powerful, Champions shouldn't have mana". If they shouldn't have mana, they shouldn't have spell-like abilities that require mana. Either give them the minimum mana to fire the trait once in combat (which is usually three), or make the spell-like ability not use mana, but be "X times per combat" instead, this will make many Champions (especially high-level ones) infinitely more useful.

Also: Drop Organized or make it oppressively expensive, get people into making faster attack squads or, better yet, see value in dropping 200gildar in order to buy that Level 3 Adventurer with a smite ability to lead an offensive force.

Organized narrows one's strategic options. Not having it widens them, and in fact will actually make your kingdom better than you would be if you had it. One powerful army versus a swarm of moderately powerful armies and a Sovereign that patrols your entire empire. Which is better?

Easy fix:

Removing it's ability is a little more tricky. Let me know if you figure out how to mod the remove of abilities and bonuses. Maybe a value 0 or something would do it, idk.

IMO, it is way too overpowered, especially with a couple more moves. Either all sovereigns should have it (via histories) or it should be really expensive.

Yes, absolutely out there doing Quests, marching into Enemy territory? Not often. Kings were not commonly on the front lines, there are a few exceptions to this rule (for instance Richard the Lionhearted), but they were soldiers well before they were Kings, and in virtually all cases they were incredibly poor Kings.

Why is it not fun? There's a lot of other things for the Sov to do. Questing, for instance. Patrolling the territories of his Kingdom. Adjusting the terrain within the Kingdom. You're still marching around attacking stuff, so the fun is still there. The fact that your Sovereign isn't physically in enemy territory doesn't make him useless. Hell, take the city with a Champion, garrison the city with your King to fight off the counter-attack. Lots of different things you can do. 

This goes one further if they add in that spell that closes off retreat points, by the by.

He is the strongest unit on the field, that doesn't mean he should be leading the Charge. Eisenhower didn't fight on the front lines. That sort of thing is lunacy. He has Generals that lead the Charge (aka Champions), the Sovereign has other matters to attend to that are just as fun (in some cases more, like Quests), and that doesn't require him sitting back in the capital because it's "cozy".

Outside of your territory, you are correct. Inside of your territory: Build more roads, then he sure as hell can be everywhere at once.

Yet if you had no Organized or you were up against a human player that wasn't using Organized, this benefit that you're seeing would be lost, because you would have one big army and he would win a war of attrition. Which is my entire point with that whole post -- Organized narrows your strategic options, not being Organized widens them and gives you a more robust strategy.

Never seen much need for it myself. The only place I care about getting my sovereign to at any kind of urgency tends to be my own cities, and there's a teleport spell or three for that. Out in the wilds speed rarely matters. Besides which the only movement buff my sovereign gets is a mount, which I can easily replicate by mounting troops. Far more important things to put points in than movement, and I'd take a buff to attack or defence first.

What does that have to do with anything? We've got wizards and dragons, realism is not on the table.

The fun is greatly diminished when I'm leading troops doing everything, until the time comes to invade someone else. Then I don't, due to the game over mechanic.

It's particuarly bad as a caster sovereign, because that's your most powerful caster and you really shouldn't use them in offensive sieges. With how rare magic is on other units, it takes the "war of magic" out of the game entirely and it becomes "war of maces".

I don't see any situation where telling a gamer not to use their best unit is a good idea or in any way fun. It's terrible.

Eisenhower wasn't his armies strongest wizard, either. Running around to inns finding missing flutes is a pretty lame thing to be doing in the middle of a war.

Arthur was a terrible King without Merlin, and Merlin wasn't running around in the front lines, either. He was constantly busy, but not fighting.

You're still leading troops doing the same things you were doing before, now you have Generals rampaging through enemy territory. YOUR purpose hasn't changed.

Think outside the box. Your unit is powerful not just because he can cast spells, he can also give the ability to cast spells to other units, giving you a large number of casters of moderate strength. Having 4 moderately powerful casters (hell, even 2) is having considerably more power than having 1 very powerful caster, because they can be in more places at once, and they can cast more times in one turn. 

If you spread around his power to a few primary generals, this then makes the Magic Tree infinitely more useful, because it has a number of "Unit Essence Bonus" techs and buildings that add multipliers (that stack like everything else) to every single unit you have that has essence, turning all of those moderately powerful casters into an army of death-wizards.

...and all of this comes about because your Sovereign, instead of being an arrogant, power-hungry fiend, placed his faith in his Generals, and imbued them with his own strength (from a storyline aspect ), which is a major task when you think about it.

Compound that with when your kids grow up and pass essence around to even more Generals, and then contrast that with an enemy who has one really powerful caster with a big army and is up against a bunch of strong armies with really powerful casters. You'd get rocked hard.

This of course goes further into making sure the AI uses these abilities as well, which is a current issue. Without MP, it makes it seem less attractive because the AI is not using it to make it appear more attractive.

In the end.The Soverreign I had to use capitals. Is the most important and powerful being In the world. In War he should be at the front. Destroying Armies and turning the tide of wars. It should only be another sovereign that a sovereign is afraid of *well dragons and other mystical creatures too* And eventually sovereigns should gain such power that they are strong enough to even beat down mystical foes and sovereigns should be the primary Focus. Their the Focal Point of all of the Lore and History afterall.

So i can't stand how people don't want them to be the main point...During Beta I thought they'd be making sovereigns progressively more important and i continued to be disappointed.

This thread reminds me of WoW forums. Please make X ability baseline, we cant dps/heal/tank without it. Then they make X baseline and they jump up to the next ability "Y". Ya know X was nice and all but we also always need to take Y in order to dps/heal/tank.

So when do you stop making things baseline if there will always be that "thing" thats "necessary"?