The problem here is that Stacks of Doom don't need those resources. Once a stack gets tough enough it can't be worn down, and will have tons of high level units with absurd hitpoints. Destroy all the undefended cities you want it won't stop a stack from laying waste to all your cities, and then turning back to retake all their stuff. Stacks also aren't that large, they are simply super high quality and level. Thus having a stack won't mean you don't have defenses anyway. 

It exactly like he said in the review, quality beats quantity to a ridiculous degree still. Get some high armor units and get them a few levels and they can wade through endless amounts of the units the AI designs. Getting stronger and stronger as they go. Not that the AI doesn't have some high quality units it's just they tend not to level them well or mass them in one spot to counter your stack. I can think of 3 things to help with this. Firstly, make the AI better at judging the strength of stacks and recognizing when it needs to form it's own super stack by putting all it's tough units and champions in one group. Secondly, reduce the leveling speed of units. This way you won't be getting level 10 squads with +20 hp per man. Lastly, reduce the scaling on weapons and armor. Either by just increasing the attack values on lower level weapons a bit and reducing the values on higher level armor, or tweaking the entire system so armor is less effective in general.

Ok the problem facing a lot if not all fantasy writers is the fact that everything has already been done before, so they are stuck with taking themes that have been used since man started writing and making it new enough to be interesting, while avoiding too many cliches or being too similar to a story already written. And thats a very hard thing to do. Even Disney has issues with that, as evidence, the shitty sequels they release of their classics. Coming up with a truly new idea and implimenting it is not easy.

Completely agree. There's a case to be made for that being true in every genre. I certainly didn't mean to imply it was easy--part of the reason we love Tolkein is that he took (quite literally) ancient themes and did it very well.

Still, that's a separate issue from the _writing_ quality, by which I mean word choice, sentence construction, paragraph style, and so on. IMHO, that is what's not so great about most fantasy writing (and, probably, most writing). Again, I fully admit to being a snob. And, again, more to the point, it doesn't matter so much for games. I just don't read it again after the first time.