First off, Id like to commend your wisdom in attempting to make a more balanced nation to replace T'ien Ch'i. After playing a bit, your mod looks to be better than T'ien Ch'i, but certainly not superior to any of the powerful nations. Good job
However, I have only tested it in SP... which means I cant really say how it would stack up in MP. Anyways, here are my thoughts:
- The troops make very effective patrollers because of their cheap cost for high movement. If you patrol with your starting troops, you can go up to 200 tax at the beginning and usually clear up the unrest!
All the troops are inexpensive for their stats: a 12 attack, 14 defense, 11 morale and 11 MR unit for only 10 gold! Yes, I know they have no armor, but this is taken into account in the resource cost, which allows you to get extra pretender points with sloth. Also, even with no bless effect, the Crazy Horse Riders only need about 10 to take level 9 indies with no losses! Luckily, they are capitol only. These troop strengths should be more or less (hopefully) balanced out by the abysmal artifact forging and lack of powerful specialized magic.
I found vine ogres to be highly superior to the treants... The treant has only slightly higher stats, but has encumbrance and fire susceptability. For 4x the cost (8x with a ivy crown), they are not even close to worth it. Even the holy golem is superior 1 to 1 for a cheaper price. The other 3 summons look fairly nice and well balanced, though.
Why the 6 starting gem income? With all the low level paths, you can already search far better than other nations, so will have higher gem income anyway.
This is a fun nation to play. I would like to try it out in MP some time, if I can