How leveling up heroes works?

[blackseer]

Main question is - are they got exp when summoned via perks (elemental, undead, animals) units do damage. Full guide appreciated:)

[Cindeerella]

It’s not AoW3, you gain experience for killing units, experience from killed units evenly divided between all surviving winner units. Minimum number of units to get experience is 4 (So if you win battle with 1 hero and getting 12 experiencece points from battle , your hero won’t ger 12 experience, it will get 3 experience points, 9 will be burn because of this system, it’s to prevent you from feeding heroes too much experience in early game).

That’s entire guide for you. I won’t be telling how much experience each killed unit gives, sorry. Yes killing battle summons doesn’t give you experience.

[Telos]

Yep, the fastest way to level up a hero is to take it with 3 helpers to a bunch of fights, rotating in new helpers as the old ones get injured, including extra units only when that's necessary to keep from losing momentum due to injuries/deaths. The 4 units will split XP for each permanent (non-battle-summoned) enemy they kill. In the post-battle summary, you can mouse-over each of your units to see how much XP they gained. Once a unit reaches max-level, it still claims a portion of the available XP, even though it can't use it, so if you have other units who can still gain XP, it may be preferable for have them fight instead.

If you're really trying to optimize hero-leveling, you may find it preferable to use fewer high-tier units rather than many low-tier units, so you can have fewer other bodies diverting a share of the available XP. You may also find it preferable to lean more on casting spells in battle rather than summoning permanent units, as both of these let you convert mana into military power, but permanent summons would compete for XP, whereas battle-spells won't.

But honestly, you probably shouldn't min-max that hard. Any sort of competent keep-most-of-your-guys-alive play will level up your heroes fast enough to stay ahead of the AI, and if you optimize much more than that, you'll probably end up steamrolling it.