They can be use as an harassment force, true, but 9 gildar upkeep is way to high, you might as well produce your own similar unit which will cost around 1 gildar upkeep.

Agreed. Their upkeep is way too high.

Preferably you can upgrade these sites to get better units.

Why would anyone care about darklings/wilding allies when you can mass slaughter them in your sleep?  The shamans and warg riders can be nice sometimes, so why not allow getting them somehow?

Yeah, merc camps and the like should add more to the strategy aspect  -- in short, they should be something worth really fighting over, just like iron or crystal deposits.

they are kinda nice if your short on metal.

I think the idea of the high upkeep is that these units cost nothing to build. I don't mind that trade-off, but I don't like that I have no way to control the rate at which I get the units, other than to raze the site. It would be nice to be able to turn off the production of units outside of cities without removing the abilty to recruit them at all.

Well, but think of it this way: when you actually finish building a unit, you've paid for it in terms of taking up the queue which could be spent on something else, and it's taken time.  Then there's a very small upkeep.  These other units we're discussing that pop up from villages, etc, cost anywhere between 5 and 8 times the amount you spend on your normal troops every single turn.  It never stops.  If the troops came with a one-time fee, I could understand that.  Or if the upkeep were priced according to their usefulness--the Asoks are certainly decent, but mercs and the like are pitiful, just about the level of your earliest available units.  I just routinely raze each of these unit-producing resources that come with an extortionist turn-based fee.  Does anyone else find them financially feasible?

Yes, but only when I'm so far along the road to victory that it doesn't matter if I spend 1 gildar per turn or 10 gildar per turn on a single unit, and at that point it isn't like I actually need additional units like these in my army, it's more of a 'well, I've got the gildar to blow, I may as well blow it on something I for some reason bothered researching rather than tie up my building queue making something else, since neither one is going to arrive in time to make a difference in the game, anyways.' In other words, it's a cosmetic addition to my faction at that point - it's something slightly different from what I'd be building, and the game is about to be won so I don't care about the astronomical upkeep cost at that point. Or a way of saying 'I'm so far ahead I can do whatever I want, waste however many resources I want, and still win!'

Also works for sabotaging an enemy's economy, if you have an Order of Asok or a bunch of mercenary camps close to a border and don't mind wasting time building the things, and then can induce the enemy to take the area without destroying the useless mercenary recruitment centers, but that doesn't work in my experience - enemies seem to prefer laying waste to anything on the way to a target rather than capturing it.

They might have a use if they spawned more quickly, but then you'd still have the problem of the enormous upkeep costs. If I remember correctly, Knights of Asok take ten turns to spawn a single unit, and 30 turns to spawn all three units. In the thirty turns it takes to get out three of these guys, if I have a good production city I ought to be able to get out four or five of my best units, if I have the resources. Four or five of my best units, which together cost me roughly the same amount of gildar per turn as just one unit of Knights, is a far superior option to recruiting three units of something which is at best slightly superior to whatever I'm fielding. I've also had games where I've focused mostly on Conclaves rather than having a fair number of towns, and there simply isn't enough gildar production in that sort of kingdom/empire to fund these guys and a real army, and since the real army is probably going to be superior to the Knights of Asok over-all, there's no real reason to get them.

I feel like the Order of Asok, mercenary camps, and monster spawners were thrown into the game in an attempt to make a faction that only researched up the Civics tree reasonably viable in a war against someone who went for a more balanced approach in the Civics/Warfare or Civics/Magic (or perhaps all three) tech trees. Looking at the Knights of Asok, they seem designed to be a quasi-elite force for low tech armies (armies which, since they are low-tech, only really have numbers going for them, and are lacking in good armor and weapons relative to opponents or Knights of Asok). Such an approach would also, in my opinion, favor a faction consisting mostly of towns rather than mostly of conclaves, and thus the faction would have a relatively large amount of gold to play with. However, Knights of Asok are ridiculously expensive even as an elite force for large, cheap armies, and moreover don't come in great enough numbers to really help out - if my focus is large, cheap armies backed by a small, elite force, three units of Knights just isn't going to cut it, especially if each unit of Knights costs me more or less the entire gildar production of a level 2 town. Moreover, the units themselves aren't really ideal for an elite force - they are small groups, and there aren't many of them, whereas I'm likely to have as many armies as I have heroes (if I'm going for a strategy of large, cheap armies stiffened by an elite core in each army) and possibly some hero-less unit stacks to close off passes. They work somewhat better as an elite response army, with the large, cheap armies there to delay enemies while the elite army comes running to the rescue, but again the units are too small and too few to really be a threatening elite army, since three midgame tech three-man units and a couple of champions, while it is a reasonable force, isn't nearly as threatening when you realize that that one army costs more than the two or three similar armies that you could have running around if you'd just trained them for yourself.

If the Order of Asok spawned, say, six groups of three Knights each costing three gildar to maintain, it would be a far more reasonable investment, although still worse than just making your own mid-game mounted units. Nine gildar for each unit of Knights is completely ridiculous at any point in the game before I've won or have so much gildar that I can't spend it fast enough (essentially the same condition as the first).