[Valerius]

Ok, one more thing to consider is gold/resources. Without indies and with only one castle you could easily have more gold than you can use for recruitment. Obviously these settings skew towards nations with low resources troops but I think there should be some way to use gold. Increasing resources from the default is one option. We could also allow tribal mages and even magic sites with mages and have that be an outlet for gold.

Another idea is to allow players to keep captured capitol forts. This provides an additional incentive to take an enemy capitol as it unlocks your non-cap mages and gives you another fort from which to recruit troops. This also helps with the problem of the last few players having more gold than early on but still just one fort in which to spend it. At the same time, you still won't have the number of forts you typically see in the late game.