Anaris's four points are a great place to start.
I understand the concept behind hateful spawning peasants but with peasant militias being too strong, they can stop small realms from leaving their border at all. Basing the number of peasants purely based on population is a bad design as numbers of each region are too high compared to what normal realms can field unless you are entering wastelands.
I don't remember who mentioned it but someone mentioned an idea involving a garrison. Instead of having militias maybe we should have that. Give each region a maximum number of garrison and make it not based on region's population or gold. Just set it to maybe at most 3k CS except maybe border regions to 5k CS.
As for archer drawing out infantry, we have to approach this carefully. If you let infantry just sit in the front row, archers in the back can just shoot them down until they wipe infantry out. Same for R5 SF shooting them down. Maybe fortification level lowering the range of enemy archers might help to force archers to move forward (maybe lv of fort / 3 rounding down might be good. That will reduce R4 archer's range against fort 5 to R3 so they will shoot from the middle which is within your defending archers' range). Infantry not leaving the wall until the number of men drops to a certain level might help too.
But in general, there needs to be more ways to siege a city. Can't just frontal assault all the time. I wish there was a way to implement supply lines. So you can literally starve a city. Kinda hard when you can just buy food and bringing them instantaneously.
Summoning peasant militia should be your last option. You shouldn't be able to use it more than once per war I feel. Once you press that you should pretty much be out of the war. Devastating your regions(preventing regions from recovering lost stats until they disband) + disabling RCs(emptying+not refilling) until peasants disappear might be a good start.
As for magic, please for the love of god, let's not do more portal events on EC. So sick of so called random events that screw a certain realm over. If portal events are going to stay then they should purely be RP stuff. No in game impact whatsoever. Scrolls need to be reduced on EC so we don't see people spamming 10 scrolls before a battle. I don't mind seeing magic steed/weapon/armor ones but other ones are just crazy. Reviving dead heroes, severely injuring nobles etc... those got to go from EC at least.
