In the Rowland campaign, one scenario involves taking one specific path and defeating a castle in the lower left bottom of the map within 8 weeks, and the reward for doing so is that Rowland takes the remaining victorious force into the final scenario. I won with about 7 black dragons, 23 minotaurs, and a bunch of Hydras, but when the final scenario loaded, Rowland just had a few lvl 1 creatures with him.

Anyone get the same, and if so, is there a way to fix this, or can final episode be beaten without carry-over force?

Roland can win the final episode without carry-over forces. If he has the ultimate crown instead. So some people claim.

I'd have another go at the scenario (The Gauntlet) where we build the carry-over forces. It worked for me. Did you capture the objective specifically with the starting hero?

The force you should have carried over is not as impressive as it could be. I rush through to capture, asap, the town where I'll be recruiting black dragons. Then, buying extra heroes, I start exploring back towards the start, capturing side towns along two, if not all three, of the roads through the forest, so as to put together an army of black dragons, hydras, archmagi, unicorns and battle dwarves.

Thanks for the help. I'll redo the scenario but went back to the first try and confirmed it was the same starting hero and just 2 or 3 days prior to deadline when I defeated Maximus. If this one doesn't carry over I'll do the other scenario and get the crown.

Can the final scenario be beat without the forces or the crown due to this potential glitch?

As a person trying to clear it for the first time and having chosen the crown and every other perk within the campaign(Roland no betrayal run), I find it really hard. Without the crown I don't see it becoming particularly much harder as I haven't been able to use its perks so far in considerable attempts, but that boost in spell power and knowledge can make a big difference in any situation, and the attack and defense boosts too. I can see however why it is generally recommended to go for the Gauntlet- I went in blind and chose the crown, thinking it would be a more reliable boost. Though I feel from my last attempt that if you get your gold reserves up early(day 2 early preferably for the one near your sorceress, and others soon after), figure out where the gem mines are(with a spell if you have it, or a detailed map if you want to skip on frustration), you then focus on building up troops for the general warring with the central enemies. Magellan's maps is useless for this, it only shows you the map of the river- if you hoped it'd give you sight of the majority of the map. It should be possible to win without either the crown or extra troops, but you'd have had a heck of a hard time with the crown too, as I am. The main difficulty in this particular scenario is not knowing the map, in my opinion. You'll probably understand as you play it.

EDIT
This is a known bug - I've Google-found an old forum post on another site "I've had similar problems stemming from the fact that I had more than one hero at the end of scenario 7, and the carryover troops came from the wrong one. Go back to scenario 7 ..., dismiss all but one of your heroes, and beat the scenario again.

"Unfortunately, you're going to have to redo scenario 9 too."
END OF EDIT Trying not to give too big a spoiler - the river is an important feature of the map. The boat we use to get Magellan's map, down in our starting area, cannot cross the land bridge to the main river. Magellan's map shows us another boat, at the far end of the main river, for us to Summon, so as to get there ourselves without having to capture a shipyard town. (Summon Boat spell of course only works on boats we can see, with a clearly seen route to the spell-caster.)

There are two landing places at the far end of the river. The value of one will be obvious once there, that of the other less so, but it is well worth exploring - that is why the pass is guarded.

The dwarven alliance perk is of little use in the final scenario, as there are no pre-placed mobs of dwarves, and I don't even remember if there is any chance of random ones, other than the astrologers declaring them! Whereas the Gauntlet has plenty. The mixed nature of my large carry-over army was not a problem, because I had Roland distribute contingents to different heroes as soon as they could meet him.

I recommend playing this a few times to get a feel for it, as it is the only one with a time constraint of just about 2 months. Don't forget to take RSimpkinuk578's advice to dismiss all your heroes except your starting one or the carry-over forces will be paltry, as all the ones used to defeat Maximus will be lost.