Hero Tavern lag

I have always used an arena style of hero selection in the past. I recently changed to a tavern style and noticed a good initial lag on hero picks now. I'm assuming it's because there are no preplaced heros in the map now to be loaded at initialization.

I didn't notice that Preload(I2S('Otch')) for every hero helped at all. Is there anyway short of preplacing the heros in the map to reduce that initial selection lag?

A good way to do that is creating and destroying at map initialization the custom heroes. Something like this:


It works fantastic.

Ah, nice thought. Thanks.