I support this. Because later in the game, your heroes can do anything. With some maluses for mages in armor, you have to protect them => more tactics required. Normally, weight should lower initiative, but I never had any of my heroes with too much encumbrance.

I don't care about the equipment really, without strength and offensive talents, a mage does no significant damage with that axe, and the armor is necessary due to the lack of defensive spells/traits - it's the only practical way to raise the defense on your heroes.

They actually already have a balance mechanic in place to prevent mages from loading up on heavy armor - encumbrance...

But then they break that mechanic immediately with mounts, who remove the need to worry about equipment load

The penalties for high encumbrance are also really minor (-1/-2 init iirc) relative to the insane init values heroes can acquire.

Get rid of the horse bonus to equipped weight for heroes (units may need it, I'm not sure), and change the -1/-2 penalties to -15%/-30% or something and you'd have a good reason not to load down your mage with full plate.

As for the multiple Paths... I'd be ok with restricting it only if they greatly expand each path's trait tree, otherwise you'd quickly run out of interesting levelup decisions to make, which would be less fun.

I totally disagree. Let choices to the player. A mage who can use two-handed sword won't be as good in magic as a pure caster. It's like multiclassing in D&D. And that was some of the joy from that game. Pure builds are often boring.

Yeah. That's the problem right there. Well, that's ONE of the problems. As others said, it also gets boring to be stuck with pure heroes.

Heroes are get too powerful too quickly, but I don't think it's because of multiple path selection.

However... I will concede that perhaps heroes should have a limited number of path selections, and should not be able to get all 5...

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Agreed. The pure stat bonuses are too high for the 'path' talents. I would prefer to see some of the other abilities boosted a bit but require path(s) to be opened. I have zero issue with being able to select mutiples paths. It is fun!

Great idea! If the Init. is a % penalty, the encumbrance starts getting vital to strategy. Horses would become very valuable and should be be nerfed IMO. I also am surprised that no one has noticed how difficult it is to actually become overencumbered. I think the amount one can carry should be lessened to a reasonable amount. It makes sense that a horse lets you carry more. It doesn't make sense to allow a weakling to carry so much.