First of al, thank you for all your feedback on this - it has quite a big impact on what we do, though you sometimes may be surprised by exactly what it impacts
The one piece of input you don't have is the single player campaign and how that plays, and as a few of you pointed out already, that indeed is an important driver when it comes to balancing certain values. While the game engine allows us to differentiate between balancing values in multiplayer & singleplayer, we're trying to avoid that for the moment because it'd make our lives a lot more complex. Of course, if need be, we will bifurcate and I expect that post-release, we most likely will.
We just had a big meeting discussing all the feedback we've seen over the weekend and the last weeks, and will be making the following changes which I expect you'll get in either a new beta today or tomorrow.
We'll reduce the prices of the units on the strategy map, but increase the multipliers of strategy units to RTS units even further. The change that is happening now is where before a 3 armour cost 14 gold, you'll now pay 7 gold for two armours (and thus 14 for 4 armours). This will lead to a 25% inflation of standing army units when battling in RTS mode which can mean that you'll get very large battles in RTS mode. The increase in AOE range/damage for units with AOE abilities should prevent blobbing from becoming the dominant tactics.
Because of this inflation, we're introducing the concept of reserves for large fights. I.e. there'll be a cap on the amount of units you can bring into RTS mode (probably determined by your support x constant). The other units will be in standby and you'll be able to insta-produce them in the corresponding buildings once support goes below the support cap. The composition of the initial army will be balanced according to the force that you brought with you.
To further emphasise the importance of the strategy map, in single player modes against the AI, we'll remove the current constraints on the AI in RTS battles where statistics say it should win. I.e. if you have a 80%/20% battle that favours the AI, it's currently still possible to win fairly easily because the AI currently plays *nice*. We'll change that so that it'll play a bit less nice. This should increase a player's incentive to take his unit composition on the strategy map into account.
Another rule which that's been in the works will also be released - when the population hits 0, you'll have the option to spawn one last time as a dragon but when it dies then that'll be it. This is to prevent the sometimes very long endgame.
I'm hoping that the advance multiplayer options screen will also soon make it's entry, so that you can fool around with all the values, sliders & win conditions yourselves.
