dropping strenght isnt necessary - and doing it like orbis (limiting spawns for the stronger enemies to certain techs) would work wonders for early game balance...
...HOWEVER... i d still love if ANIMALS (bears, wolves, lions, stags, etc. etc.) would never go above 8 base strenght for plain flavour/fluff/lore/immersion reasons (picture a bear taking on a group of immortals and beating them....).
everything above 8 strenght should be beasts (wyverns, wyrms, dragons, hippogrifs, treants, etc. etc.) , not common animals. those are fair enough to be able to take on even elite melee troops.
so basically i dont really mind meeting str. 13, 3 movement enemies (from my above example) provided that...
a) they come into play at a suitable time during the game
b) that they arent plain animals but proper beasts for which their high str makes sense lorewise.
short-form: its basically just a cosmetic/fluff issue. imagine instead of acheron there would be a 35 STR duck sitting around in a barb city. imagine instead of stephanos the rider of the apocalypse would be bambi the deer and dumbo the elephant. maybe bears with 13-26 STR are not quite as ridicoulus as that but imho its close