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[lonkipt]

I have some suggestions for walls and how to perhaps balance them out a little more for turtling players and for encouraging more use of them.
 
Aside from the costs, the biggest problem I have is that the much reduced range for building wall hubs has made even limited, strategic use of them implausible and sometimes even outright impossible: Namely, I often can't block chokepoints that are even very close to starting locations due to the imposed range limitations of the mod. I believe this is contrary to the intended design of many maps to accommodate walls better, back when the range used to be greater. Currently, too often a player has to build very long stretches, indeed, in order to possibly bridge any gaps caused by this limitation in range, often causing walls then to skyrocket in costs far past most units and structures for even a small additional stretch--but at a fraction of the functionality of them.
 
So, I suggest making unupgraded walls able to be damaged somewhat easily by normal infantry and unable to build arrow towers or catapults--at least until upgraded via the fortress upgrade for fortress and wall armor. In this way, you could even lower costs to be in step with this decreased armor and lack of defences, while even increasing the building range a bit more to reach many of those pesky close chokepoints. Maybe this change would make it so that unupgraded walls could be more like, say, palisade walls from Age of Empires: Something that basically just slows infantry down a bit before they finally smash through the wall segment. It would still require work on the part of a player to defend the walls from attacks but would not discourage the attacker so much as currently happens so much with walls.
 
Furthermore, to discourage any potential rushing of the fortress upgrade to the walls, instead of just increasing the cost of that upgrade I wonder if each wall segment could have its armor upgraded individually after the fortress upgrade is bought...? If so, each armor upgrade for each wall segment could be a bit pricey, accordingly, and would force a player to have to be more discriminate about which areas to enforce, if he would so choose. Naturally, in this example, the arrow tower and trebuchet buttons would be greyed out until they were unlocked by said fortress upgrade.
 
(Incidentally, using such a fortress upgrade could also be a good way of finally providing Isengard with wall defences down the road, if so desired.)
 
Another gameplay suggestion would be to allow wall hubs to be built anywhere on the map but with a relatively small range for extending walls, so that a player would have to think more carefully about how best to place them and have to work harder to use them offensively or defensively. Preferably, the range of the wall hub should be enough to allow the blocking of most chokepoints, but not much more; and only the central hub from which the walls would extend would be able to allow more walls off it, not any other hubs built off it. In this idea, you could still keep the above mechanics of unupgraded walls having very poor armor, etc.
  
You could even keep costs somewhat higher than vanilla to help prevent wall spamming while not so expensive as currently to discourage players from using them at all.
 
All of this could encourage players in investing in walls early, while the walls would not be so powerful as to cause dramatic price increases or discourage attackers over much (or discourage players in general from using them), while also encouraging more careful thought down the road after such investments are made, thus increasing the dynamic possibilities of this discouraged, increasingly obsolete, or otherwise problematic structure.