I have always felt that the resources needed a little more to distinguish them. Fungus a little too much like herbs, HoG a little too much like sacrifices. So I've thought about adding resources to tiles, that either have no interest for mages or only for specific mages. Here's what I have so far:

Graveyards: +1 Fungus (only normal ones, not cloud ones)
Sacred Spring:+2 Herbs, +1 Sapphire
Castle Ruin: +1 HoG, +1 Relic

Yeah these are some fairly reasonable suggestions for rarer terrains that likely wouldn't have a huge impact on overall balance. These suggestions or something in this vein could be added if there seems to be a need to slightly buff the income rates of a certain resource.

The Unlikely Hero. Strong. Fast. Deathprone. It's all very thematic, taken as a sort of cruel joke from the dev--about how Illwinter games eschew the concept of heroic humans by maintaining that no, even the deadliest human could not fight a troll. He shows up full of promise and dies horribly in immediate anticlimax. Is this the intended reading? Either way, lets set it aside, and speak as a player: What is this little weirdo for?

Usually, he is a free explorer. He maps like, 9 tiles before something kills him.

IF you have items for him, he makes a decent blank slate to turn into a champion. Many classes have better options for this role, but others don't. The biggest caveat is that unless you have something for his body slot, filling the other slots won't keep him alive past the enemy's opening volley.

He sometimes spawns with his own item, which you just take from him before doing the above.

It's not like he's overpriced, cuz. You know. But often times he feels like he isn't worth the extra keystrokes it takes to use him. Well, here's my pitch:

Let him promote himself into a Hero. This could be as simple as spending gold and iron on a forge location/citadel. Or it could be part of a reward for a more involved ritual, an "adventuring" gimmick looking for an arbitrary piece of terrain like the thief does.

Nice, I like the idea of giving these units a little more potential. I doubt I can get the AI to use them wisely, but either a ritual or X number of turns to promote could certainly make them more valuable then a temporary explorer with a magic item lottery.

It's a bit of a niche concern, but, well, you know those "chivalrous" commanders who spawn out of events and run off getting themselves killed? Well you can charm them, and it's quite a coup, as they are a sturdy midrank command 1.
But due to the unique behavior that powers their movement while part of the empire faction, they are suuuuper jank once player-owned.
I think you could fix it by giving them a ritual that promoted themselves to an identical unit without all the behavior baggage?

Sorry, I'm not actually sure what this is referring to. What's the name of this unit?

"Chivalrous Captain". An event spawns them as part of the empire faction. I thought for sure this was vanilla material, but it occurs to me I haven't turned off dynamic elysium in forever.

I believe this is a "Dynamic Elysium" event. Which if that mod works with this one that is pretty lucky.

It does! Perfectly, as far as I can tell.

I have long thought that morale was an underutilized mechanic. Pretty much every faction has access to some kind of morale buffs, but few factions have access to fear. Many games, it winds up being a nothing-stat. I've never brought it up because I've never had ideas about how to feasibly mod-ify it.

I'm still not all the way there; the main issue is that the standard Causes Fear tag is quite strong, and the only other options are clunky fear attacks and the even stronger Terror ability that dragons have.

Right now I'm imagining Causes Fear distributed very liberally to monstrous units like war elephants, and some of the existing fear-causers upgraded to Terror. But it could be balanced out by distributing Leadership and to more non-mage commanders.

Well, I know this would be a lot harder to balance than I make it sound. But I DO like the idea of giving non-mage commanders something USEFUL and thematic to do besides leading mageless armies. Just as an example, Dragonspawn Captains with leadership would have a place in an army led by a prophet--currently they're pretty nicheless! Other factions have similar situations!

Unfortunately the morale stat is only usable as something to roll against to resist certain weapons/attacks. I would love to see another dynamic where troops could see a lucky strike chance at high levels of morale, but it doesn't seem possible with the modding tools/commands.

Fear effects are definitely very powerful and I would be hesitant to implement a change where it's a more common stat. Leadership/local leadership on the other hand I think has potential to see more implementation across the board to give some bland units a bit more flair and more meaningful ways one could invest in means to counter fear-causing units.

I'm glad you see what I mean about leadership--it's such an important concept in Dominions, delivering so much theme! The frustrating thing is that currently, apeing that in CoE5 won't do much--since morale usually doesn't matter.

So, in order for classes to be complete on all map types, there are events that ensure the eventual presence of both a capital and a king's castle! That's great! But the result currently is that these valuable tiles wind up guarded by forces that spawned for a more common one... something to the tune of 4 archers and a pikeman. Not ideal! You might even have a conquered a town, just because the defenders were weak, only to find yourself with a free capital 10 turns later.

So here's the idea: events "A city has been declared capital of Elysium" and "A castle is now fit for a king" now additionally spawn a modest, respectable army of Empire/Kingdom units on the relevant tile.

If it is still ruled by the empire, the army will join the existing defenders and form a worthy challenge for players. If it is held by a player, they will need adequate defenses to keep their free upgrade.

This was something I had actually considered but not implemented yet due to some doubts that neutral units suddenly appearing on an owned tile would be strange. But this sort of thing definitely already happens in the game, so I'm leaning towards pulling the trigger on this.

I think there's room in the "standard human mercenary" roster for a little more variety. Many classes use mercenaries heavily, and throwing in some reasonable new faces could spice up a LOT of gameplay at once. Costs and rarity make good balancing levers.

-Zweihanders(similar cost/rarity to halberds/pikes)
-Trebuchet(3x the cost function of a catapault. high rarity)
-Spellswords(cost on the high range of pickability. Maybe 90-120 G for 5, 170-220 for 10. Not common, but not super rare)
-Cavalry(similar total cost to halberds, slightly rarer)
-Heavy infantry (expensive, in the 75G range, rare like Cav)