To make an accurte assumption about the difficulty of the current orc battles, just to see if they realy are, there have to be pools involving as many players as possible and differentiating between new players and older ones. After that you have to get to the bottom of how difficult it actually is compared to the intended difficulty, they are the ultimate enemy at this moment. IF it turns out to be more difficult than it should be you have to look into the roots and figure out how exactly, which parts make the asses explode. And ofc find a solution to lower the difficulty to the intended difficult level.
As for myself, I have no big problems with the orcs. The old tactics work just fine with the new updates, both goblin and worldmap one. Sometimes against extra large groups I lose hirelings due to caressnes. But they are supposed to be a challenge. Still you need no high end backgrounds to fare against orcs successfully.
As for your gold value estimilation. How can you put a pricetag on all brothers equally? That is just nonsense. From my experience, the loss of so many armors is almost impossible when consideting the cost, you have decent equipment. You want to get your point across but this feels like extravagating.
