Terrible Player.

[Squirrelloid]

Its true. They can get afflictions via taking damage though - i've seen diseased demons/UD generated that way.

I always laugh when a GK pretender gets 'diseased' as an affliction.

Iry:
One of your problems seems to be this idea that the goal is to amass an overwhelming army and then crush everything with that one army. This is primarily a strategy game, not (really) a tactics game (although tactics is important, at the level you're playing at you can mostly ignore it).

The strategy 'have one large army' is a losing strategy. One army seriously constrains your choices. You can make one attack per turn. You can be in one place at a time.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu: the best deployment approaches the formless, for if it is formless, even the wise cannot make plans against it.

So, field multiple smaller armies. Attack multiple provinces of an opponent when in a war. Avoid his large army if necessary until you can assemble enough forces to deal with it (try to predict where he's going and meet him there). Use remote spells to whittle away his numbers, or, more likely and usefully, his commanders. All the while take away his provinces, jack the taxes if you don't think you can defend them, and thus destroy his economy.