Well my orginal thought on generals was that they would each work a diffrent way. For example (because dota is commonly used, and is appropriate for a rough tool) take chen, brood mother, furion, and keeper of light (though KoL recently got a rework, but I'm talking about the orginal version). Each has it's own method of having units, chen steals neutrals, brood gets them from killing units with a buff on and her minions can make subsequent minions through the same buff, furion makes only one unit type from trees, kol makes a unit which makes more units, which heal. Dota has some varied (partial) general, with varied minions. QoT and Sedna summon the exact same waym vampire and oak basiclly both summon off dead units. And all these units are barley varied, the two largest variations are shamblers have some slight range, and spirits fly and some simple stat adjustments. No special abilites, only one unit each, 2 spawning methods, only 2 unique variations. Thats WEAKSAUCE!
So what I think could improve are the folowing: make more spawn methods, wheather it's on attack/kill, buy from base, on cast, on being hit, or anything else. Also more actual abilities! make shamblers able to root or something(they're not too bad range+eatble is not half bad), make yetis able to jump, make vampires minions able to death explode or something. And also more variety! When I orginally thought of generals I thought of multipule units and specialized units and other things, not: oh I can spawn lots of one unit. I saw things like diffrent forms of shamblers, thorny shambler(dmg return), spindly (long range) shambler, burnt shambler(high armour/fire resist). Or vampire minions like maybe the spiny things in combat, but also able to buy vampire eliminators, fast high damge to demigod units, or buy blood sappers, little building bombing units. Or in the case of sedna, as shes more a healer, crowds of yetis make good sense, but maybe throw in a captain yeti, or ranged yetis for good taste, and make like the third summoned yeti the captain and the 4,6,8 th ranged. And for the spirits, maybe make them retain aspects from which they died, minatours are generic, archers are high damage, priests are hp regen, angeles are move speed, ect. ect. Thats what I orginally thought of as I heard about/saw generals. While the Idols are nice, I would rather have more special unit variety before being able to summon bunches of units which are already on the field (though a mind control device, or scrolls (one use items, multi use trophy) of that type could be good items/trophies(?, is that what theyre called?))
Also a balance thing that bugs me is that a melee general (specificly sedna) has no way to stop air (specificly spirits) as the siege archers can't hit air (archers? really now?). And demigods are probably epic enough to figure out how to hit air units in most cases (rook i can understand, he has arrows, maybe UB not being able to as well, but he needs a way to stop air, qot (I haven't checked her) would be just fiable, oak has spirits, and vampire can floaty jump?), sedna has a pretty long spear and that... thing can prolly jump, so please some air cover please? relying on base defences wave creeps is not a viable solution.
P.S. I can still barely connect so the net code hmmmm, its first priority in my mind.
P.P.S. The game is definetly looking better each beta, skill trees are evolving to forms that I like better, so keep up the good work! also if your reading this... then you are keeping up the good work anyways! (most game companines would go: oh look 100 new posts, lets go play madden football 2005 for 4 hours for inspiration on the 2009 version)