Please remove free gold and troop gain, this'd be the one real way to majorly nerf huge 100+ player clans or map wide alliances, it'd also make sitting afk in a fief as useless as not even playing strategus, this'd require a new feature for recruiting troops though and for it all to actually work out well it'd require a decent amount of new features added in general.
I'd suggest having random groups of AI wandering around on the map with random sizes and gear, won't try and attack people, you could approach these groups and either buy some of their troops (3 gold per troop, so 1000 troops would cost 3000 gold, but they shouldn't ever travel in groups near as large as 1000 so you'd have to search the map for more), you could of course also just attack them.
I'd also suggest allowing players to buy village/castle/town population, but requiring that the owner of the village/castle/town has manually agreed to do the deal, he could set whatever price he pleased, however, no matter what 2 of the gold he charges per troop will be removed from strat as "payment" to the villager so while whoever owns the village/castle/town technically could sell his population to his own faction for 0 gold they'd still pay 2/3rds of what they'd pay for hunting random AI troop sellers, and they'd lose village population.
The above would solve the issue that a 100 player clan will be able to get 100 troops per hour while 10 players would only get 10 troops, however, in order to still not make having more players an extreme advantage you'd still need to flatten the troop upkeep and do so that you'll pay upkeep from as low as 1 troop, 'else having 1000 troops spread out across 10 players would be a major benefit over having 1 player carry all the troops, maybe not 100% flatten the curve but it at the very least would need a serious flattening in order for huge clans and alliances not to be much better off.
Now, onto gold gain, since you still (at least I think you still do) earn like 1 strat gold per 5x tick or something insanely small like that you'd still fairly quickly be able to buy 5 strat goods in some village and then begin trading until you have a decent supply of gold if you spawn midstrat as a complete noname player, however, due to S&D protector clans this might still be near impossible lategame, therefore I'd suggest (this is not really a that important suggestion just a minor thing which might make a tiny difference) random AI bandit lairs popping up across the map where you can buy or sell at a fixed price of 10 gold at every one of them or perhaps ('cause fuck you S&D horders) allow for you to pay the bandit lair 1,5x of some villages price in exchange for after an amount of time dependent on how far away the fief is the village will lose the correct amount of S&D and the goods will be waiting for you in the bandit lair, however its distance bonus would be decayed to 50% and there'd be a chance (depending on the village/castle/towns army, not the amount of guys inside the village, not the population, the army) that you'd lose your gold, not gain anything, and the faction keeps its S&D.
EDIT: And please lower the roster sizes, lots of battles end retarded due to one army having more than 2x the other guys players, as for example chadz battle, outnumbered the enemy 2/3 or something like that, even though he had shitty gear he would've probably won if not for the enemy having like 4x his amount of mercs.
