I like the way things are balanced now. SC can kill some plain mundane armies easily, anti-SC SC can kill anti-army SC, special anti-SC squads can kill any kind of SC, anti-anti-SC squads or SCs can demolish anti-SC squads in retaliation etc. This makes it a challenge to create a strong army that can deal with various opposition. Typically, such army would include few SC, few strong mages, some weak mages (part protected, part not), few anti-SC squads, some damage dealing squads, some squads to disrupt and slow down opposition etc. Removing SCs out of equation would simplify those issues and I don't like it. SCs are already dying easy enough now. (Damn those tritons that hit Tartarian for 200 of damage!)
I disagree that rush to SC is a must, I played few very successful games using no SCs and mostly national armies until quite late in the game. Some nations are good, some are not, so the strategy varies depending on the nation. One of the problems SC have is that they're usually less numerous than national armies. So when one side is attacking with couple of dozen of national armies, what the other side (which has let's say 5-10 SC) is supposed to do? National armies are cheap and easily replaceable and putting SC in the open alone often mean losing it. So how SC-side can defend? They can choose which battle they win, but they lose majority of battles. So to me the balance seems fine.
Looking at it from thematic point of view, it would look strange if few thousands infantrymen could defeat some fully equipped Tartarian Titan (hey, he was a god after all). But on another hand I can imaging that Tartarian may get bored killing all those annoying infantrymen. So maybe, there should be a new parameter - boredom, which increases if the unit is fighting somethign easy and decreases when it defeats something challening (for example, another SC)
