I think the magic system is broke and could use a re-work
It's broken both ways; the amount of damage magic can do is disproportionate to the amount of damage anything else can do. You can EQ and FB a person 10 times in a row if you have the wizards, and that just goes up the larger your kingdom is and if you're hitting someone smaller. You can't attack a kingdom 10 in a row no matter how big your army is.
The amount of damage a magic based player takes is undefendable. If you spec as a caster, your kingdom is vulnerable the the slightest gust of a wind. This makes that playstyle unsustainable. Now some of you have said, well just play better or build an army instead, but that defeats the purpose of having a game where magic is supposed to be an option. It should be balanced to go into magic or into force, not forcing everyone to play the exact same style.
Magic sucks because you can't ever win a castle by using it. And it broken because it can nuke and zero out a player disproportionately larger or smaller. The way that it functions against smaller kingdoms is far more broken and toxic in my opinion.
And a major issue I see is the toxicity that it brings. A caster will get farmed for castles because of their weak army, and the caster can never win or do well, but they can ruin a game for some one else by nuking them repeatedly. So it promotes a lot of random casters popping up to simply do that. The style make both people that are locked in that battle feel like they are losing more. I hear people say "don't play that style then", but magic is a style a lot of people enjoy. So rather then tell people that they shouldn't play that way, how about we make it balanced and fun so that it's viable without being OP and without being as durable as a wet tissue.
Dwarves and Gnomes shouldn't need to spec into a style that is designed to not work for them, just for a slight chance to defend against something that's undefendable. Look at Fanthor of A20, he already quit after trying to use magic and realizing how pointless and useless that strategy is. We don't want people to quit. We want them to feel like they can fight back and get even with people who hit them, not get into the mentality of "well if I'm quitting anyway I'm going to make them quit too."
