Thank you, I agree! But I always get shouted down, mainly by players with older cities. Squad size upgrades do not do a terrible amount of harm, this game is balanced. I will taking one or two soon, my blue provinces are vanishing.
In the current game SS do help on the world map, but hurt your performance in the tournaments.
This is because a higher SS create more losses in the tournaments with the same unit production:
Example:
Both players can produce 1.000.000 archers a week
The SS of player A is 3300 and player B 4000
Both players play a battle in the tournament and loose 10% of there units in this battle (enemy is balanced towards your SS so you both face the same enemy with a different strenth value so the losses are the same percentage wise)
For player A this is: 3300(ss) * 5(unit slots) * 0.1(10% loss) = 1650 dead archers
For player B this is: 4000(ss) * 5(unit slots) * 0.1(10% loss) = 2000 dead archers.
As you can see player A has the advantage here, he lost less archer so is able to get more value out of the same 1.000.000 archers compared to player B who will run out of his archers earlier than player A.
Since you can battle hundreds and sometimes thousands of battles a week in the tournaments, while for many max 8-16 battles a week on the world map this is why people came up with this idea to skip unnessesary SS to keep the losses in the tournaments low.
The "impossible fights" on the world map are then solved using negotiating instead of fighting saving up units to be used in the tournaments.