Neutral army starters will be the key element here.
I’m proposing the following numbers after some analysis:
-Castles would start with 3 armies. So a player in the initial round would have 3 + 3 auto-deploy + 3 region bonus (there will be no region bonuses in this map but I think we’ll have those minimum 3 troops– right?) making a total of 9 armies to use on the first round.
-Catapults would be protected by 6 neutral armies – they give a fairly reasonable income of 2 armies, though they come in auto-deploy mode and with limited options to use. We also need to make this value high to avoid initial 1st round bombardments via trebuchets on other castles.
-Cluster Knights would start with 4 neutral armies – good income of 1 free army (Knight + Castle) + 1 in auto-deploy mode and a very good ability of assaulting in a range of 3. All other knights would start with 3 neutral armies.
-Cluster Archers would start with 2 neutral armies – 1 army in auto-deploy mode in a region that can only bombard apart from assaulting other archers in a range of 4. All other archers in-between Castles would start with 3 neutral armies.
-Villages – the only straight free-to-use bonus shouldn’t have more than 2 neutral troops to kill.
-Trebuchets – the only neutral killer, would have 3 neutral armies
All other regions would have 1 neutral army on them.
The King’s Court All Noble family members would start with 4 neutral troops though they will only give a +1 auto-deploy army. But I do prefer to enlarge this value to 4 and reduce the value of the Counselors to 3. This way the second player wouldn’t benefit immensely from the first one taking down a big bunch of neutral armies there.
The King should have a high value in army numbers for its importance while giving access to all castles. Don’t want to make it too big though – I’m proposing 8
P.S. – non attributed Castles (in 3, 5, 6 or 7 player games) should start with 8 neutral troops
Neutral starters placement- Click image to enlarge.