[Aezeal]

Personally I'd say that if you are going to do it like this you should make ALL nation exactly the same. If you give all nations a very wide selection of troops and mages covering most of the standard "human" troop types that would be best IMHO. The mages would need to be without randoms IMHO to remove most possible luck factors, all would depend on the changes you make yourself and what you do with those in the game.

my choices would be slightly different from those in that txt file.

I'd say:
- a militia with some armour
- a light infantry (with about average armour for a light infantry)
- heavy infantry (with about average armour for a light infantry)
- Flagellant
- archer (no armour)
- crossbowman (least armour version)
- light cavalry (again av. armour)
- heavy cavalry (av armour)
- some sort of medium powered sacred cavalry (not TOO high in prot, preverably less than heavy cavalry, probably cap only)
(also you could remove both flaggalant and sacred cavalry if a bless strat becomes a must have, or make flaggelants cap only too.)

- scout
- assassin
- commander
- mounted commander
- priest
- a high priest
- a variety of level 2 mages in all paths

- 1 gem income in each gemtype for starting sites. It's more than average but not extremely powerfull in any one type. Generic site names "Castle" which produces 4 gem types and "Knights guild" which poduces the sacred cavalry and the other 4 gemtypes or something.

start with scout, commander, 15 archers and 15 light infantry.

Options would be
- recruitable barbarians
- recruitable longbow men (but would make archers obsolete so I'd go with one of the two)
- instead of 8 types of level 2 mage you could make them level 3, or level 2 in 2 paths (FIXED), or level 2 and level 1. (if you go this way I'd optimize the crossmatched paths for spell and forging options.

So concluding: keypoints for me for this "chess" game would be NO RANDOMS, TOTAL EQUALITY IN CHOICE, WIDE VARIETY OF CHOICES.