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HotNifeThruButr said:
I don't think allowing more or more free troops or restricting magical troops is the answer.
I think the answer lies in expanding the content behind national (and independent?) troops. How about something like custom troops?
When you want to create a custom soldier, You get taken to a window where you start with a basic naked infantryman, cavalryman, or etc (no pictures  ).
Then, you choose what sort of training you want, like militia, regular, elite, super-elite, and each higher option costs more gold.
Then you're taken to a window with your national weapons, like a glaive, pike, spear + tower shield, composite bow, and falchion + tower shield for Tien'Chi, and you pick a weapon, which costs either and/or resources.
Then, you're taken to another window where you pick your armor, like leather or scale, and you pick cuirass, hauberk, or full, with better armor costing more gold and/or resources.
Different nations will get different national weapons and armor, or troop types, and etc. Atlanteans would have something like "Atlantian" and "Shambler" instead of "infantry" and "cavalry"
This way, you can make "normal" Dom2 scale soldiers, or, for a lot more cash, you can make soldiers competitive with summoned enemies.
Another way to make national troops better would be to simply make better troops recruitable. Some factions have pretty pathetic selections of troops, often with redundant roles. When you've gotten down to it, few nations have more than two troop types. Maybe
just my two cents.
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This wouldn't actually make national troops any tougher, though. It'd mostly just allow players to field hordes and hordes of naked troops, since practically all national troops are good for is a quick meatshield.
Besides, everyone who favors the "beef up national troops" approach seems to be overlooking the thematic dissonance that sort of fix would entail. National troops, with the exception of Niefel Jarls and whatnot,
should not be able to defeat mid- and high-level summons in a fair fight.
I suppose it might be
balanced for a squad of heavy infantry to bring down a mad, undying god from the underworld, or a gargantuan flying statue with foot-long claws, or a brood of giant snakes whose skin can melt iron, but it would also be downright ridiculous. Either you're a hero, capable of picking your teeth with trees and chasing the sun into hiding with a scowl, or you're a mortal. In the latter case, you've got 12 HP, tops, and no amount of skill or determination is going to change that.
On the bright side, there are plenty of alternate means of making national troops viable without granting them power beyond mortal ken. For instance,
A) Create a niche for them. Going toe-to-toe with a wight or devil should never be a good idea, but a few tweaks to unit gold and resource costs might see them come into their own as patrollers, raiders, skirmishers, whatever.
B) Don't strengthen national troops, but price them much more efficiently(and/or raise the cost of summons, give them gem upkeep, et cetera). In smaller battles, where supply is not an issue, national troops would have a quantity>quality edge over most summons. In larger battles, they'd still make a strong backbone for an army of summoned shock troops, flankers, and so on. For an even larger battle, they'd still be so competitively-priced and expendable that they'd play a useful support role, if only as a meatshield or as missile support. Awfully similar to option A, save that the idea here is for national units to actually have the advantage on an open battlefield, rather than simply in a few specialized roles.
Note that this
may require that something be done about spells that effect the entire battlefield. An army that can be effortlessly routed and half-annihilated in one casting of Wrathful Skies or two or three of Bone Grinding is no army at all.
C) Tweak research and the magical economy so that summons only begin to dominate later in the game. National troops would still serve no real function in the endgame, but they'd play more instrumental a role in the early stages of the war, when the infrastructure for the later stages is established. Sort of a gradual slide towards obsolescence, rather than a near-instantaneous plummet within the first two or three research levels.