Interesting that you point out the villager count to be the problem.
I’m totally on page with OP regarding the Keeps are to strong.
I would not like to see some flat restrictions on the villager count, it can be an disadvantage to have too many villagers same as, to many army, finding the right balance is part of the game and should depend on your techs, civ and state the game is currently.
I like the strategy aspect of not being strictly limited in any way.
Maybe you want pop-efficient units and need more vills, like knights or handcanoniers. Or you have to stick with trash units because u run out of gold, then it could be beneficial to have a bigger military size to make up for it and trade more cost-effectively. There is always an optimum depending on a lot of factors and your strategic approach, but to find it should be up to the players and not limitations.
Lets say player A has 80 military pop and player B has 60 military pop. Player A has 33% more army population. That can massively snowball and outweigh the extra villager income.
Right now keeps, walls, and to a some degree, towers are preventing the bigger Army to utilize its strength in the lategame and grant the defending player valuable time.
Every second no one is fighting it is beneficial for the player with more villagers.
and here is the issue, the player with the bigger army size and 200 pop is on a timer not the one with less army! His main objective is to take with his bigger army a good fight asap, but a single keep can delay the push by minutes and would equal out the military advantage if u fight under the keep or if u have to build siege to take it down. The other option is to deny resources. This takes usually long until your opponent runs out of it and he could again free villager at some point and pick the fight with a bigger bank, more pop efficient units, techs and such …
Even though its super lategame, you face the same problem as in feudal, where single tc all in is such a big risk to take with the new TC.
Even tho in later stages it has a bigger potential of success, it becomes not so 1 dimensional, but it is such a big risk that players like to play it safe both with their options, that leads to the “aggressor” waiting for its siege to do its job and the defender usually with the better eco, trying to play the long game.
For me the issue is not the villager count that you can build, it is imo just a side effect of the current meta. The defensive structures are too strong or the counterpart to weak, that prevent the player with the bigger army to accelerate and apply damage.
Mainly keeps are the issue in late-game, fighting under a keep is such a big disadvantage, that you need currently trebs to deal with them, this is slow and time consuming and 3 trebs diminish the military pop space advantage again. If you go bombards, it could be sniped with springalds or culverins, if it succeed it adds again minutes on the defender side.
Together with the productions close to the defender side, having the army lead and being pop-capped can be a disadvantage now, if u cant make use of it in time.
Let’s assume 140 vills, get one extra minute because of a single Keep drop and a minute is super short for a keep that u have to siege down. Just this one minute with a average gather speed of 50/min … You gathered 1000 resources more than your opponent or 7000 total resources.
The auto targeting of defensive structures introduced more than just the 2. TC meta. It also stretched out the mid and late-game and benefits a defensive eco approach even in late Imp games, where u then start to turtle up until you have everything you need to win.
I wish they would have done something in between. They could have introduced an ability, that allows a defensive structure to auto target for a period of time when activated, when the 30 seconds are over, it is on cd for another 30 sec and would behave as before. It is on you to get more value out of your defensive structures, it would delay pushes and be still strong, but is not overperforming, it helps more casual players and would be something in between.
They could also make it toggable as an option, so it auto activates on the first ram attacking the defensive structure, this way even super casual players that “sleeps” a bit will not directly lose their keep to a single ram pushing it with a small army. All others can try to get more out of it by timing it well and defending it with their army when it’s on cooldown.
The devs like rock scissor paper, but they oversimplified it with the defensive structures, they went for a non-skill-based approach, which is just boring. It can be also balanced through sheer stats rather than mechanics, but it will remain less interesting to play and watch. I like to get rewarded for my plays, horsemen on top of the archers, demo ship into springald ship, if we can get something on the defensive structures and sieges that leads to a back and forth would be nice. The old targeting system was providing the back and forth and could have been tuned or redesigned in an interesting way to make it not so micro-intensive, but by exchanging it with an auto-fire mechanic … the game lost something big imo.