You're making a false claim that you can have 50% more camel archers than keshiks. You can't. The barrier that you run up against with both units is access to horses, not cost. The keshiks produce more GG's which after the first one or possibly two are burned for extra golden ages making up for any increased cost. But that's a moot point anyway. You can field as many of both units as you can get access to horses, that's the real limiting factor. Money rolls in from conquest.
My suggested experiment with a tiny pangaea map was to demonstrate how an initial war of conquest goes with both units. A tiny pangaea map is not dissimilar to a continent of 4 civs. It'll contain a lot more than 5 cities, more like 15 - 20. And my point was not that it is hard to conquer a tiny deity pangaea with camel archers, but that it is slower. So if we then translate that to a standard deity pangaea the Arabia player is attacking the last three civs at a significantly later date and will run into significantly greater resistance and is therefore less effective.
Claiming that the extra 2 move points are superfluous and convey little to no advantage is ludicrous. Instead of covering up sloppy play they can be used to give maximum possible tactical advantage to the human player. The fact is that even though the keshik has a lower attack, more attacks can be fired as there's rarely a situation that your entire army cannot cycle or rotate through critical hexes to shoot. A camel archer moving into a rough tile can only fire from there, not move afterward. This is a massive disadvantage compared to the keshik.
Artillery is the first unit type that makes things awkward for keshiks, but for camel archers they're a deal breaker. On standard maps conquering 7 civs with a camel archer based army and by the time you hit the last few civs you're going to find that the ball games over and you need to change the composition of your army. Not so with keshiks.
Deity standard domination games are winnable with Mongolia deep into the sub 200 range. I've never seen anyone post anywhere near that kind of result with Arabia.
Question: have you ever won a standard everything deity domination game with Arabia? I wouldn't enjoy the task as I think they're better suited to other victory types, but with Mongolia that's the prime VC to go for.
The barrier can be resources, but in a war with losses on both sides the barrier is production speed, who can replace units quicker? I rarely find myself in a situation where I run out of horses tho, seems I can always either conquer enough in an early war or buy off a city state.
You should try that experiment you propose before you come to a conclusion about the outcome of it. You may be surprised when you throw in Arabia's other specials how much quicker/more powerful you will be over the Mongols. I've played many games with both civs and every time I dominate thoroughly with Arabia in every sphere of the game, during the era of camel archers, helped in large part by camel archers, while the Mongols don't play as smoothly and money/happiness constraints they experience significantly slow down any conquest of any map of size above tiny. The ability to purchase happiness and support large empires/armies/city state allies will always win over the mongol specials. This test however is flawed in that it does include the other unique building/unit and ability, giving the edge to Arabia, but not a pure matchup of unit vs unit. Also in any test like this you would run into the problem of determining which ai civs to choose, some might be more challenging for keshiks/mongols than the camels/arabia and vice versa.
My suggestion would be, with camel archers, don't move into a rough terrain spot? There's nearly always alternatives. As for "maximum tactical advantage", I would say this is already reached with a 3 movement unit that can fire two spaces away. Anything beyond this for movement spaces conveys only the most minute of advantages and does not outmatch the improved strength, attack strength, and low production cost of the camel archer.
With mongols you need to conquer the world with keshiks vs artillery fights. With arabia you will have such a vast science lead that you'll be far into cavalry based armies long before the enemy has artillery. Like in civ iv, economy will always win out over one specialised unit limited to a specific era.
If no one is posting these victorys it is likely because Arabia is considered more of a 'culture/science/diplomatic" victory contender, this is where Arabia really shines. If you are going to a challenging domination victory people will likely choose those civs which are more stereotypically associated with that kind of victory. Also, people get into this game the way in which dungeons and dragons players do and seem to pick civs more for their historical prowess rather than their in-game abilities and the Mongols were far more interesting than the Arabs historically, prejudicing people to play them more often.
I have won a deity domination standard everything with Arabia. I'm not sure what this is meant to prove or disprove tho? The AI is horrible in this game and tho I haven't yet, I don't think it would be too difficult to pull this off with even Kamehameha. I would really like to see an improved AI in this game that acts at all logically, even giving the AI masses of troops doesn't seem to help them any, they still have no ability to focus on strategic or tactical goals to any degree, nor have the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions of a battlefield. I think this is the problem with the hex single-unit per tile format of this game versus previous incarnations of Civ, the programming which would be involved to create an effective AI would need to be of such a high level that it becomes ridiculous to contemplate. What sort of supercomputer was required to run a chess AI that could beat Kasparov? And that was just chess, this game has far more variables than that game.
Again I think if you were more tactical (as you should be) you would find those extra two movements on the keshik unnecessary luxuries which don't provide any benefit except in allowing you to correct mistakes you shouldn't have made in the first place. If you have barracks etc, logistics doesn't take extremely long to get to, plus if you're getting hit as often as you claim you may need to use the auto-heal instead of the promotion on your units.
