Decreased high end build times.

Like it says in the title, the higher a building is I believe it should take a bit longer to level up but not to the point it is now. From lvl 23-24 barracks it takes 160hrs (this is with 40% reduced build time from research and command center) and only merits an extra 50ish AP. Coupled with costing 100k-120k in almost all resources. It's kinda getting silly waiting 1 week+ for 1 upgrade that doesn't do much. Now if say you bought yourself some nice shiny gems, a quick division comes down to 9600 gems (160/5 = 32 purchases of 5hr boost at 300 gems per), or nearly 64$ USD. That's a lot of cash for one upgrade if you go that route, if you don't that's still a lot of time to wait for a near non-existent gain. I just used the barracks as an example but it still takes 3-4+ days for any of my other buildings to upgrade and I'm at the point where I'm just donating spare resources save for gold (damn you expensive repair costs!) to my guild because I have a full building que and my storage fills up faster then I'd ever be able to spend it. I understand the need to grind and wait, but if that's the case at least let the wait be worth the time, not being able to even field a lvl 0 light infantry or equip a really nice epic doesn't constitute anything more then a giant barrier preventing players from seeing an almost non-existent gain in their gameplay experience. It takes days to acquire the resources, but weeks to build a building is what it boils down to.

A couple solutions to this could be to make a max cap, time wise to say 4 days. Allow for multiple buildings to be built rather then just queing up and waiting for one building to get done (this would increase the use of the AH buying and selling, as well as make players want to purchase the expensive research related to it). Or you could also simply up the productivity of said building, ie rather then 50ish AP for a barracks it could be 100 with a long build time, that way you could at least see a difference, albeit a small one that wouldn't unbalance the game itself but a fraction.

Personally I like the 2nd option the best, simply because it stimulates growth and development among all players, and to counter more buildings being constructed, it could keep the long wait times to help keep the game from developing way to quickly and end up burning itself out. The third would probably be the hardest and most time consuming due to balance issues and a donator with more cash then sense could cause a nasty backlash to the overall gameplay of others.

I didn't reach this level yet, but I'm kinda ok with the situation. You aren't supposed to "finish" the game in a couple of days, but in months or over a year. It's frustrating, yes, maybe the number changes for upgrading higher level buildings should feel more impactful. For example, higher the resource building, more time it takes to pay for itself right now. Increasing the benefits of higher level buildings is the way to go, if anything is going to change, in my opinion.

I'm far away from your status Rokun, but i just had the same thoughts about it.
I just finished the upgrades to receive Cavalry this day and was thinking about what to upgrade next.
In my case, the next level in Barracks (14 -> 15) would give + 15AP (nearly 24h at -19% (around 130K resources in total)).
But to receive these +15AP i have to upgrade the command center from level 10 to 14 first, which will cost me surely > 200k resources and i think 4-5 days of construction.
All of this to equip an unit with one extra "+10 item"?

I thought the same thing you guys did. Overall, I think the devs want a very long grind and they made those numbers intentionally large. In fact with XP, they have increased the amount of XP required to level up units 2 or 3 times now.

I get the impression that the devs are a little concerned that players will finish the grind before they complete enough cyclical endgame content to keep the game interesting and stable.