Question and proposal...science rate and unit upgrades

Does anyone know how much it cost to upgrade an ax to a swordsman?

Would it be possible to perhaps lower our science rate for a turn or 2 in order to upgrade a few axes to swords. The iron that we have in our borders has been mined by its not connected to the road network. It will put our construction of the swordsman needed for our war with Mongolia almost a whole TC behind where it should be.

Any offset in our science rate can be made up with the gold we get from capturing and pillaging the mongloian countryside. Of course if the amount of gold is too high then we will have to put off the war for a little bit longer than what originally thought.( I was going to propose starting thr war when Old Sarai reaches size 2)

Any opinions and thoughts are appreciated.

The advantage of swords vs axes isn't really that large, just 1.6 strength difference starting on a base of 5. Even though this is around a 30% difference in raw strength, it can be compensated. Both are decent attackers against fortified archers, as long as you have large numbers of attackers. If your defender has a warrior instead of an archer, the axeman gets a 50% bonus vs the sword's 10%, yielding 7.5 strength vs 6.6.

I'm not sure about the combat changes in the patch, whether they make it easier to kill a wounded defender or more difficult. If someone gets a chance to model it or look in the strategy forum to see if there is an answer, please do.

The tradeoff is between the delay in getting a war started, vs the expense of upgrades and the resulting science impact, vs using a few more units.

There's also a big tradeoff between pillaging and keeping improvements. I'd assume we would pillage over in the lands we're letting them keep, and capturing intact improvements?

Yes thats the plan pillage where they can rebuild for us later...and not pillage what we plan of keeping