Heroes play a major role in the game. Good heroes can give you major advantage over the opponent players.
Heroes have three attributes politics, intelligence and attack and overall level. Heroes help you gain prestige and honour fast when you set them as mayor.
1. A good politics hero gives you extra resource and reduces building time thus quickly builds up prestige than other players.
2. A good intelligence hero reduce the research time and gets more information in scouting other players city or valleys.
3. A good attack hero minimizes the troop building time and win a battle against stronger opponent player.
Heroes gain experience points by attacking cities and running your own city as mayor. When the hero gains a certain amount of experience points you can upgrade him to next level and he gains an attribute point for each level up. This attribute point can be added to his politics or intelligence or attack. So each level upgrade of a hero improves one of the three attributes. As the hero levels up the experience points needed to reach the next level increases. For example ,
A level 5 hero will need 2500 experience points to move to level 6
A level 6 hero will need 3600 experience points to move to level 7
THE INN - RECRUITING HEROES
The Inn is the primary source of the heroes you can recruit. The number of heroes that come to visit the inn is equal to the level of the inn. Also the level of heroes increases with the increase in level of Inn.
You have to spend more gold to higher level heroes. But remember, higher level heroes do not always mean higher attributes.
So, recruit those heroes who have low levels and high attributes, preferably level 1 heroes with more than 65 in any of the attributes. Also remember recruiting higher level heroes needs more gold and they will consume more gold as salary every hour. So, recruiting higher heroes may make a hole in your gold reserve.
New heroes come to the Inn every hour, so you have to check the Inn regularly.
Some people create a level 1 Inn and repeatedly destroy and rebuild it. So every time you rebuild it you get a completely new hero. This process will halt all other building upgrades.
Some people recruit heroes and dismiss them repeatedly. But this process wastes a lot of gold.
Another way of getting new heroes in the Inn is to click the "refresh" button in the inn. It will consume a "Hero Hunting" Item from your chest and refresh the Inn immediately.
Unfortunately, you get limited number of "Hero Hunting", so this process can not be used many times.
CAPTURING HEROES
Another way of getting heroes is by conquering valleys or cities. Whenever you conquer a valley or an enemy city you will be able to capture the hero who was defending it. If you have empty slot in your feasting Hall, the captured hero will be placed in your feasting hall and he will be shown as "captive" with loyalty as 0. To recruit the captured hero you have to click "Persuade" and award him gold or medals. Medals are required for promotion of your rank, so it is not very good idea to recruit heroes using medals, unless you have a lot of excess medals. So you have to recruit them by spending gold.
Captured heroes from valleys are not very good ones (that's why they got defeated under your attack). However, If you capture a city from a good player it is likely that he will have a good hero.