1. There are indeed a lot more shops available but I feel pretty underwhelmed when it comes to the shop's content. Racial troop availability is horrible outside of their racial continent and Lizardmen units are almost Reha-Exclusive (don't count the wanderer scroll for the moment). Another rather popular level 4 neutral - Demonologists - is so severely limited that you can play a game or two without actually seeing them available for sale (run KBScanner if you feel unconvinced).
2.
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game is strongly slanted towards high level units...
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There are a lot of units available in the game but regardless of game objective (no loss or not), most units end up being less favorable than the others. So What gives for having so many shops that actually sell a lot of less favorable units?
3. Many shops sell a combination of units, items and scrolls but they hardly differ from one another. What I mean is that they don't have a mercenary camp that offers a truly wide range of units (not just 4 or 5), a magic academy that houses a huge record of scrolls and can even take order to create one that you need, a blacksmith that can actually forge an item or a black market that sell obscenely overpriced but high level items early on.
Yes the shop structure in AP inherits its predecessor but sadly more doesn't necessarily make it better.