My 2 cents as a player are the system mail thing is a good idea but only for the extended maintenances as getting a mail everyday for a 15minute maitenance would just be redundant.

As a mod however it has been explained that supermassive armys that require millions of food an hour were never the intention of the developer and are purely the result of overagressive players, so dont get your hopes up about compensation of any kind for you losing your troops, also as Foxy has pointed out this had to be expected at somepoint