[Arralen]

written without seeing johans posting ..

supplies:
One big problem with standard troops is the lack of supplies in most provinces. (As someone stated above)
This not only makes it impossible to use more than, say, 100 human troops in one army, it almost 100% assures that the AI will attack you with an army of starving and diseased units, if it ever gathers a strong enough hord of its medium inf to do so. (That it doesn't build castles isn't that much of a help, either)

This supply issue stems from the fact that units in Dom2 eat at least as much as in Dom1, but provinces have noticeable less pop, and therefore less supplies, too. Furthermore, on most of the popular maps you'll notice a overuse of the terrain feature. But anything else than grass land and plains has poor pop, and modifiers from terrain plainly add up, so you can "ruin" a grassland prov by marking it as forest .. .


upkeep-free troops
There are, obviously, 3 types of upkeep-free troops:

At first the auto-summons which are rather week and sometimes cause more problems than they help. Charging a, however small, fee for them will simply kill some themes. (Pan CW, Pan w. turmoil, Ermors etc.)

Then there's the second type: Troops/commanders you can summon using gems. Some of them are quite costly for their stats etc., some are one-shots-only as they don't heal etc. Those aren't that much of a concern, balancing-wise. The problem is with those which are better than all buyable commanders/troops and don't have a glaring weekness within the area of their "intended use" - as soon as you have the gems and the path level, there's few reason to buy any regular commanders/troops any more.

But worst of all are those commanders/items which can summon upkeep-free units .. so you basically all you pay for commanders and units is the starting gems .. speak of deminishing cost, exponential returns here.

excursus:
Midnight Games ruined their Module "Realm of Immortals" for their PBEM "Legends" that way: Every unit had a race and a magical status. Some stati where able to inflict lesser ones from their "chain" onto soldiers for free - and on commanders, which in turn could inflict lower stati themselves, than. Units were upkeep-free in general. Game ended up after 100 turns with armies of tens of thousands "Vampire Lord Elven Guards of xy" - soldiers or similar crap. Each of them as strong as the avareage fighting commanders where - but the game was designed with a clear emphasis on those commanders/characters, which where only useful as troops trainers in the end. (And mages, using a handful of critical spells).
Been there, tried it, suffered horribly .. why should we repeat this in Dom2?


suggestions for solutions
Temporary solution to fix (and test) the suppliy issue is to use a scale mod that ups supply production by 200..300%. I'm running 150% at the moment, and it seems it could use more. Creates an interesting strategical effect: Because it's a %-tage, mountains and swamp don't get that much improvement, so there's the choice to take a smaller force through the mountain and/or make a detour with the big horde.
(ATM, you'll either forge supply items en masse or use non-eating summons)
Maybe one wants to beef up gold income, too .. would tip the scale in favour of buyable units as well.

Using max. 40% magic sites and very difficult research will let players test how the game plays without über-magic and -summons.
To really fix the problem, making those summons limited in number definitly isn't a solution. Quite the contrary: this does encourage rushing for "tech".
Upkeep in gems most likely poses too much programming problems.

One possible solution would be that the summons simply leave after a while (this mechanism is already there).
"Secondary summons" shoudl be either very weak, or completly removed, imho.