The Dorf Swarm gets nerfed! Alas poor Yorrickhelm! We hardly knew ye ...

What do you mean by that? I can't follow you mentally.

Bank up highly-trained Dorfs to carry sieges. Dorfs aren't the best outdoors except in really rugged terrain, but they're tough siege troops, especially against trolls who they seem to surround with surprising efficiency, so if you train 'em and bank 'em you can unleash the Dorf Swarm on some eminently deserving target.

The free upkeep nerf really isn't that bad. You can leverage your income sources by mixing troop factions, like if you have good Gondor and Elf income you can field a more elite army by having a mix and spreading the cost.

Limiting your Rohan roster to just horse archers lets you afford more Thengel Guards if you don't have other Rohan troops eating up your Greenbucks.

In general if you fight you rank, and if you rank you get more pay for troop upkeep, and the higher ranks are quite generous, so the only thing that really gets nerfed by the half-pay rule are special teams of single-faction units for which you won't have high rank, which hits the Dorf Swarm right between the eyes.

Elves are of course superb missile siege troops, but Elf income is pretty easy to get if you concentrate on one faction, and the only horse-compatible pierce bow you can get takes a lot of ranking anyway, so the Elves from that faction you can easily afford to pay by the time you earn the Noldorin Bow.

Getting enough Dorfbucks to pay a massive army of the best siege infantry in the game is a real trick, so charging half-pay for idlers kinda nerfs the Dorf Swarm.

Gondor infantry units are good at sieges, so half-pay isn't the end of the world.

Time to explain a few things in more detail.

When I play a faction, I usually level the surrounding factions as well. For example in a session with Khand I also have uruks and orks from Mordor, humans from Harad and Umbar. In order to be able to pay all troops, you need a certain rank, which is logical.

I would not deny that dwarves and troops from Gondor have good fighting power. But the point is that I pack leveled troops into the respective capital. I like to see how an army keeps growing. Paying for more than 50 elite (max level) troops in the capital plus your own squad is usually not feasible with level 5 for that faction.

That army is ment to be the last stand against the hordes of enemy besieging the capital of my faction. Before that update I had a session where I played as an elve of Lothlorien. I had 100+ elite troops that saved my ass against the hordes of Dol Guldur and Moria. If I had to pay them that time, the darkness would have come over Middle Earth.

I thank you for your comment anyway, even if it's of no real use to me. I already implement a lot of what you said.