yes but my general gist is that you can raise the upkeep but use this to balance the fact that PLEASE let us have more than one summon per type (eg several fire elemental etc.). if someone wants to go the summoner road then why not give him the option to build an army of fire elementals, or at least more than one! they only have to be balanced with mana upkeep. every other fantasy 4x does that, otherwise the summoning tree is just severely gimped.

that and the borderline undead race is my biggest gripe atm :/. besides these two gripes, i actually prefer to play FE:LH atm over AoW3.

the game has so much potential, but in some corners its just unbalanced. sorry if this is some kinda rant but it can't be that you buy a (quite interesting) race per dlc and they are gimping around with lvl1 cities. sure they have no upkeep cost, but having lvl1 cities ain't fun.

well yes, i posted this with my personal reasons because i wanted some opinions about the topic. in that case i wasn't assuming a wave of agreeing posts.

in terms of the dead i think that when they go the road of 1 pop per kill then why just humans and not to a certain degree also every other mob, maybe just .5, but at least something.

yesterday i started as altar because i wanted to see how the AI handles the dead. at around season 70 i had only one city which was 70% on the way to lvl 7. only one city duo to bad starting location and too high lvl monster blocking my way to more prosperous grounds. yet as i was encountering one of the undead, my strategic value was 18 and their was 6. they were flooding me with tribute payments. the dead which should be an evil and powerful race are just the bullied kids which throws their lunch money willingly at the first one they encounter. they can't offer any challenge. what should i do now? disable the dlc or add races personally when i want a challenging game with strong AI players? that shouldn't be the solution. especially after you pay extra for the particular race.

If summons are to be mulit-castable, I think in addition to the increased mana upkeep, you would also require casting delay for the stronger summons.

You are correct in that the AI does not know how to play the undead well. I was really hoping SD would take the gaming community serious on this point and introduce some positive changes that mods have brought out to help make the undead more challenging when used by the AI.

I think the undead being basically a faction to be played by a player only is not going to change. Stardock will not put that much money just to optimize AI for one faction. They should however be clear that AI can't play undead, otherwise, people can and will feel cheated. 

The game now is in a completed stated, there will be no more revolutions, just polishing and adding a new content - all the money goes to the next version of a game. I do not mind actually to have dlc with the factions that introduced new, original and radically different mechanics - but only for players. I preferred that than nothing, and I know that realistically speaking upgrades to AI require enormous amount of work and coding. 

honestly i don't care how much stardoch has to pay or invest in terms of manhours to make the dead playable by the AI. you bought the dead world dlc with extra money and the AI is piss poor (sorry) with them! if i buy something then usually i assume that it will work as intended!