I think what you're seeing with your troops is the issue with the Spire/tourney formula that rears its head past Ch15 and is even more noticeable after Ch16. Generally the formula will show you how your squad sizes (and thus losses) increase. Research is definitely the driving factor, but there's also the reduction of benefits of those research techs for upgrades of military bldgs that improve troop production. While there are improvements in your production, it does not keep pace with the increased squad sizes/losses like it does in earlier chapters. I don't recall the exact numbers (
@SoggyShorts and/or
@CrazyWizard one posted them somewhere but I can't find them). The general idea (with random numbers, I think they're close, but maybe not
) is: your research techs will improve your production by 25% from the end of Ch16 to the end of Ch18. The result of doing all the mandatory techs for Ch 16-18 will increase your squad size/losses by 50%. Looks to me like that will make it extremely difficult to keep up. I'm not as far along in Chapter research as you are, so I haven't had any direct experience yet.
I decided to take one city past the end of Ch15 (I usually take a couple months break between chapters; took a year break after Ch15, lol!). I have just unlocked Ch17 in that city and I haven't yet seen a huge difference in my ability to do what I want in Spire and tourney (top of Spire weekly, 5 rounds of 20 provinces weekly). Before the formula changes, I was doing 2 rounds of 50+ provinces (for the kp) and 4-5 rounds of 15-20 provinces. I 100% fight the Spire and 90% fight the tourneys, so I don't have experience with diplomacy/catering costs. I primarily fight manually in both, so that helps reduce my losses considerably as well. I put down one of each type of expiring military boost bldg every week, so one ELR, one MMM and either a DA or UUU. I have lvl 10 Fire (1) and lvl 10 Brown Bear (1). A lvl 21 Time Warp and lvl 10 Polar Bear means I can conserve bldgs and Fire feedings and use them for both Spire and tourney (when my personal real life timing works, lol!) I rarely feed the Brown Bear since we got separate training queues for the 3 military production bldgs, but that may change as my squad sizes rise. I'm one of the luckier ones with the Pet Food RNG in crafting (otherwise I'd be sure the RNG was set up to inflict the lowest return possible for me personally
) so I don't see an issue if I need to feed it once/week. I was on a once/week schedule before we got the separate training queues. But, as losses increase so much faster than production improves, there may not be enough pet food in all of Elvenar to keep up. Still, I'm going to finish Ch17 (I want the pretty blue dragon AW, lol!) and then
reassess continuing to progress*...
*My biggest beef with the change: why in the world would you ever need to assess whether you want to continue to progress in a city building game?