When was the last time you built a city CW? It's easy to forget the experience. These changes seem disastrous to me.
The first troops can't even survive provincial battles beyond the first 2 or 3 - they have never been effective for anything in the lower chapters. The spire offers critical resources tiny cities need and learning to moderate your resources is part of that. Tiny cities will be unwelcome in established fellowships if they can't contribute to group goals. Without tourney growth is stunted even further than it is. Nothing good will come from these changes.
Is it possible your limited experience with starting a city has narrowed your POV?
Maybe you havent? paladin/treant are awesome and you get 100 of them.
Off course you need the unlocked tech tree to keep fighting
beyond 2-3 provinces I hope this is your sarcasm mode. as long as your tech tree keeps up you can fight a lot. at the mean time your ability to make units and goods improve a lot as your factories grow, your barracks produces, your units get an extra star, and your relics increase by 8 a province on the world map.
The main issue is you need your recources either goods or units to expand your city, in the early game the best source of boosted relics is the world map, not the tournaments. and spire is even worse. it's very easy to loose it all in 1 swipe in these parts of the game. either goods or units.
So more focus on world map and tech tree at the start of the game is a good thing.
Maybe, just maybe just like I often did, you got lazy starting a new city, sponsored that city a few thousand goods opened some lazy provinces and never got in the correct window?
This really skews your POV on new cities. especially the fighting part.
And yeas you need your SS research to be able to fight there. which with a lot less KP is now a lot easier to unlock. in fact it's even likely you get stuck on provinces with the massive cut in KP to move on, which makes sure you got the correct techs unlocked to fight.