There aren't bots or people buying much land in the PW, if you start with little land then it's gonna be all about the troops which is like world 1 i.e. boring. Make it about the land and you get something very exciting and at 15% dev cost it's going to be (and does have to be with only 2 weeks) easy to tech up anyway.
What does it matter if the numbers of troops are scaled up? You may be getting huge values of units but due to the way score is calculated, the person who wins will likely be the person with the most land (unless somebody BH's non-stop).