The point is... X army is possible normally. Y army is possible with a bit of effort, Z army is possible, but only barely, and requires a lot of precision and upkeep to manage.

If you want an army bigger than the average, you're going to need to do something to gain more than the average food allowance. Be it making special storage towns, farming players for food, using food production raising items, or purchasing food with game coins. Whatever the case may be, you should have to go outside of the box to find new ways to expand your army so it's bigger than the rest, and thus making you more militarily capable than others.

Perhaps it's not possible to naturally maintain the types of armies people have now, but it's certainly possible to maintain ones larger than your farms would normally allow. It just takes more effort than sending an attack off to an NPC every hour.

In the end, now you will be able to do as much, if not more, with a smaller army because other people also have smaller armies. If they other guy has 100k archers instead of a million, you only need 150k to kill them, instead of 1.5m. It's all scale. This scales EVERYONE down, and allows for more expansion into the upper numbers. Furthermore, because this scale now fits with the level to which the rally point and food restricts you, it makes attack vs defense much more even.