I'm only a non-competitive player, and I only play against AI, so I'm not really going to pitch myself as an expert,
It is good and healthy for these forums not to be dominated by deity players and minmaxers. Those who play the game as you do are probably the huge majority of the playerbase - and any discussion around units etc must consider this angle.
I just want to say that the MOAR units mod used to have Cuirassiers at 66 strength, if I'm not mistaken, and they were absolute monsters.
Dropping in units like a cuirassier runs into the problem where you have to consider not just the era it falls in, but also the units that will be around when it is both
new and
old.
A New Cuirassier faces little non mounted competition:
Muskets 55
Pike&Shot 55->65
Cavalry 62
Field Cannon 60 *50 (melee str)
Ranger 60 *45(melee str)
Because tanks come in the next era, cuirs are spared the issue of having to face down infantry and ATcrews unlike their cavalry brethren. The issue here is, of course, that the infantry lines don't have any industrial representation. So it looks like FXS decided to hold back Cuirs to 64 (should be 68) so Pike and Shot could beat them. This is a little better than the medieval situation, because at least here P&S cost 250 vs 330 for cav&cuirs. But of course, anyone who can build cuirs (niter) can also build muskets (niter), which are cheaper than P&S and hit them for +10.
Of course, if both mounted lines
cost the same and use the
same resource and cuirs
have more strength, I have strong doubts players who aren't scythia won't just use the stronger line
that also becomes tanks because killing units better is worth going from 4 to 5 move (both can cross two hills a turn anyways.) This is a strong argument for why light and heavy cav should never require the same resource.
If units are all just flat the same except for combat strength and movement, it's pretty obvious that the one with higher combat strength will be superior,
I have studied this for a long time. I think there were several key design ideas that all got mixed together.
One was that each unit line would have special attributes and uses- heavy cav hits harder, ranged pays for safety with reduced melee str, etc.
The next was that unit strength should rise by 10 points per era.
The third was that unit gaps will force players to vary their army.
The fourth is that cost is determined by what row of the tech tree units unlock in.
You can only sustainably have 3 of these 4 at once though. The first two are really good rules; the third is fine. Adding the cost rule just wrecks the entire game balance.
Ex:
1) heavy Chariots cost the same as spearmen, have 28 str, and 2 or 3 move. Spears can hit them for +7. (this is IMO the original & balanced design of how heavycav-anticav was supposed to work)
2) Horsemen are
cheaper than swords even though they are faster and also have 36str.
I'll distill to this: they've clearly tweaked a ton of stuff from the original design to handle unit gaps making half the units useless. But the entire point of unit gaps was to tell players "suck it up" and deal with armies where half the units had the upper hand every era.
Anyway, I don't think there's ever going to be a way to make the units balanced if they don't throw in more modifiers.
I could write an opus on this topic. I think a lot of players agree with you here. We literally went through this in civ5.
