Losing heroes

[Tassadar]

I recently started to wonder if it possible to permanently loose heroes, as the information on this is a bit unclear. During my "regular" AAR here I've run into a situation where my recon car unit suddenly lost a Field Repairs hero and upon closer inspection I am almost 100% certain that it was due to the split unit getting the part with the hero destroyed and thus permanently lost.

However, looking at Edmon's recent video here I'm now wondering if that's how the things work. Around 19:10 in the video bridge engineers with River Assault get wiped out, but since the video is pre-recorded, the news is thee hero survived. So, quoting my comment from that video, I did a quick check of two things. First was an old set of saves - it confirms my hero is no longer there at the end of the Smolensk 1941 mission and future scenarios. Second - I loaded a save at the end of a random mission I still had and intentionally had a hero killed. He was still there at the start of the next scenario, regardless if the mission ends on the same turn or later. Same for having him surrender. Yet my unit is evidently missing a hero in that older playthrough and he was not dismissed by accident for sure since this leaves "XYZ has left the unit" note.

Wondering if anyone can provide insight on this and possible reasons? The only thing that comes to mind is deleting the hero by accident while he was on the reserve list, not yet assigned to any unit after that part where was added to got killed off. Sadly I do not have saves from the exact moment where the hero loss happened, so no real way to replicate it, but it's still a interesting situation.

Overall if heroes cannot be lost permanently then it;'s a bit of a shame, as it adds a lot of importance to keeping best units safe. Some players might not prefer that, so ideally we'd be in the "optional slider choice" situation here as well.

[Bee1976]

Well i have already lost some unit splitup with heor on board, i was able to simply reassign them after that scenario ?

Atm im playing with a self made rule, if a unit dies, i wont reassin any heros and sell them instead. that adds some spice

[Tassadar]

That's what my test suggested, that they can just be reassigned later. Still in that Smolensk 1941 mission that was clearly not the case and I'm super curious as to why.

[Vorskl]

That's what my test suggested, that they can just be reassigned later. Still in that Smolensk 1941 mission that was clearly not the case and I'm super curious as to why.

I lost a hero on a split unit that was later destroyed, and the hero mordaciously returned to the assignment pool!

[Kerensky]

For what it's worth, I like the idea of high risk gameplay (splitting units) to have actual high risk elements (permanent hero loss).