You are accurate that 60k armies are rather hard to get together.
I've never seen one in all my years. The largest armies I've ever seen are the 40k armies that Sirion's Northern Alliance has been pushing around over the last year. And I've been in a lot of wars. Most large armies in my experience are around 20k, and that has stayed true for the last decade.
The difference is that those armies are increasingly being made up of smaller numbers of larger units as the player base shrinks. I remember a time when 30 men was a good standard unit. Now if you can't recruit to 60 men you are a poor piker. The income is simply going to fewer people so each unit is getting stronger. But at the same time, less money is going to the nobles now since regions don't generate as much income for small numbers of nobles. So a lot of gold is lost to inefficiency. But it still results in smaller numbers of more powerful units.
What you've failed to notice is that I've agreed that militias are a problem. They've been a major issue for most wars of conquest for at least the last couple years. The only way to break a realm is to surround and starve it out, but if it has allies selling it food and sending money, you can't do that. Oligarch ran into that issue while trying to take the Sirion City near it during the Sirion Civil War. Oligarch could beat the Sirions every day of the week in the field but couldn't break the city. Then Sirion ran into it when they tried to break Oligarch. The Southern Alliance ran into it while they were rolling over everything north of Highmarch. And Sirion is probably going to run into it soon with Perdan. Lots of wars over the last couple years at least have seen this problem.
I don't agree that it is unfair for the militias to do what they do. They've done it for every realm for years now. That's an equal fairness. Or perhaps an equal unfairness.
What I want is the game mechanics fixed so realms don't abuse them, while fixing the militia issue so it balances things better for all nations. I want equal fairness for all so everybody can have fun playing without unreasonable or unrealistic battles being fought that tug at the willing sense of belief we all put into this game.
We used to have a lot more players, who could play twice as many nobles, in realms with much greater tax efficiency. Before estates, because reduced capital radius.
Now, you basically have one 200 man unit instead of four 60 men units, the latter having much more CS than the former not only because it's more men, but because the CS/man is much higher pre-60 than post-100.
Meanwhile, nothing has changed for militia. Heck, people use more of it than they used to. Which further means less gold for mobile units.
5) Sieging with infantry not as effective - sieging with siege engines is probably one of the dumbest way to take a city when siege engines are hard to comeby and you need x2 the infantry to effectively siege the walls.
I just hope we will get more tools to work with. Apparently the tools we have aren't really efficient at getting the job done.
People used to siege with a lot of siege engines. Now people don't want them at all anymore. I'm not sure what changed the meta, but maybe we should buff siege engines?
