Alternate Summoner idea, balance concern?

[Occidental]

Hey all. Recently I was interested in playing a Summoner, but I wanted to do a bit of an alternate idea (one that is soundly unimportant to where this has all wound up). I searched around and found a few things that approximated what I wanted, but weren't quite right, so I decided to make my own Summoner archetype. From there, things got even more out of control and I ended up more or less creating an entire class. What I need help with is just to determine the viability of a replacement Summoner class that:

- Has 1/2 BAB
- D6 Hit Die (D4 maybe???)
- More skills (better skill list too)
- A more versatile Eidolon (in the broader sense, gets some class features and non-trash mental scores, but lower Evolution Points)
- Akashic Veilweaving instead of spells
- A kind of customize-able summoned "squad" of more humanoid soldiers instead of the Summon Monster advancement


The idea was that the Eidolon would always be there, hanging around, and you could make it more generally versatile, helping you out in non-combat situations, or with scouting, or really with anything you can think of, or just being a combat monster like the old Eidolon is. Then for the squad, you would invest Essence into the ability in order to get soldiers, 1 soldier per Essence invested. Any soldier that died under your "command" would burn the point of Essence you used to summon it until you rested again (As point of reference, you have probably 1 point of Essence per level, and Akasha imposes a 1-per-5-levels cap on how much Essence you can invest into any one thing, that can be expanded with a feat). I was thinking that the soldiers HD and other abilities would scale up slightly as you levelled, but at most would be something like level 10-12 when you're at level 20, something in-line with what Summon Monster can give you, but bearing in mind that Summon Monster is only for a certain number of rounds. Like Summon Monster, their stats would be mostly from a rigid selection, so it wouldn't bog you down with customizing the soldiers, the Eidolon, and the character, it would just be mix-and-match when you invested 3 Essence to get 3 soldiers, whether you wanted 3 archers, or 2 archers and a big heavy-armor guy, or two speedy TWF-ers and a polearm user, etc.

Basically what I'm looking to get back from anybody who'd care to lend their 2 cents is whether or not I'm just totally blind to something really overpowered/underpowered/bad about the concept, and where to aim for how strong or weak any of the abilities should be. Like for example, how many class features the Eidolon should get, how many Evolution Points the Eidolon should lose, how fast/far to scale the soldiers, etc etc.