Most of the examples I listed (ocean, mountain, another civ's territory) aren't about poor maneuverability, they're about NO maneuverability. It's just very hard with 1 unit per tile to move an army that large. As I mentioned before, the only terrain that benefits melee more than range is a very dense (> 80%) forest/jungle with no hills. If the terrain is swampy (admittedly rare) or hilly (quite common), your landsknecht are toast as their movement will be reduced to 1 while the composites still have a range of 2. Machiavelli already discussed other types of terrain in great detail. What other kinds of terrain do you believe benefits melee more than ranged, and why?
My point about logistics was just to make the minimum assumptions. I don't actually want to make that point, because as I said, we'll go on in circles forever making assumptions.
Yeah. The trouble is it's impossible not to make assumptions. In hills is where I thought the sknekts would have most advantage, really, not the least. Sure they have to charge two turns to reach you, but your archers have to pick between moving and shooting.
If your archers had melee mixed in with them on flat ground, then your melee could use ZOC to force my sknekts to move only one tile per turn, while your archers are free to move + shoot.
In the hills, ZOC doesn't mean much, but flanking bonuses still help quite a lot. A knight hits your triple flanked X-bow and probably he would one-shot it.
(If you built Alhambra, then I built 6 more crossbows during that time. See how that works?)
Holding off to build Alhambra is a good game long investment.
However I may also be spending gold to build them. And the incredible cheapness of sknekts means it's practical to build one in even my smallest cities. Really the upward limit on how many sknekts you can get fielded has more to do with maintenance costs and less to do with the hammers.
After I'm done with Alhambra, I'll be almost thanking you for killing my cheaper Sknekts (from the small cities with no barracks), so I can get the higher quality Alhambra sknekts out without dying a financial death.