Something tells me you have little idea of what you are doing...
Empires are weak enough already as they are, atleast in the last offical Heroes and Empires versions I played.
-> Yeah because the farm are so big in official version,with mini-farm of hacked version it does be a lot easier because in fact farm cost lower. However with big farm i think they should not cost more but instead give more food, or at least we should being able to upgrade farm so that we don't have to spam 1/4 of the map with farm...
A hero is easilly able to kill an empire before he can establish himself. Also farms produced too little as it was and needed insane tech levels to achieve anything.
->Not fully aggred, an empire can easily take down heroes if he do it quickly, specially if you play in high difficulty (which i always do), 2-3 anti heroes towers INSIDE your base and you can down anyone coming in.
Instead of wrapping heroes in new skins and stuff like that, more pressing ballence issues should have been addressed.
-> 100% aggred (and i hate new trader skin)
The rangers multishot makes her extreemly powerful and godly late game. It would be advisable to reduce the number of targets or her range.
->agreed, specially on ranger which is way too strong with multishoot, anyone knowing the game almost always take him since multishoort & nova make him so overpower (nova is very usefull in low lvl)
As for empires stat exploits, rations should be rationalized to solve this. People are only able to eat so much, thus logically there should be a cap on rations, probably in the range of 15 to 20. Equally well with tax there should be a cap on it as people only earn so much at around about 10 or 12.
->May be interesting, but from my point of view, rations could also be confort, i mean Rations could also be related to the lvl of life, not only food, then it'd make more sense to wave 50 rations.
Empires payout to hired heroes should be based on their income and stuff. Thus late game the hero with low pay should be getting hefty EXP and more trade points than even a high payoff early on. Currently tradepoints are related to pay rate levels, thus low pay levels give no tradepoints. (in 7.3)
->True, Tradepoints are way too hard to gain if you aren't a trader in the actual game (except in those H&E maps with the 1000 tp wood...)
To reduce lag, there are two options. Firstly simply boot everyone with a shit PC as this game is demanding. Secondly optimize the pop system further. You may wish to try a less accurate threaded update over time approach with only the calulations run every interval rather than the full update each interval. Doing this would mean that the load could remain near constant no matter the empire size.
->Actually a Dual Core is highly recommanded, it's the only way to avoid crash when an empire ran power off, i tested with 2 computer, the one with simple Core crashed, no the one with Dual Core.
Also for empires a "pop shair" system would be nice. Whereby new buildings automatically are filled by draining pop from nearby or random houses to speed up development and make it more realistic.
->Not bad if it doesn't make everything lagger, however i keep the idea of 3x3 house first.
An research que system would be nice as well to help reduce wasted time.
-> TOTALLY AGGRED, the one to do that would be praised by me for life !
Also the one enemy hero with the AoE stun (lich I think) needs a nerf. The stun lasts horendiously long late game during which time you are totally ususless. Maybe a hero reduction would be advisable. Like wise the curse from the dreadlord should at high levels lower accuracy more but have a hero duration reduction.
->i said something like that too
However you really just need to focus on optimizing the triggers so that it lag less. Ofcourse I take it you are highly skilled with JASS, as it would be silly for someone without that skill to even consider taking on such a high quality map as this.
->True, i saw the trigger of a hacked map of H&E one time, it really need a skilled one