if you make pikes even stronger noone could hold their ground vs a well played "attack" (not rush) with mass landsknechts.
Hence why I said "
instead of halving the hammer cost..."
2 landsknechts beat yet a longsword but cost only the half! (your job to get the eco to mantain bigger armies)
2 Landsknechts cost 100 hammers. 1 Longsword costs 150 hammers. 100 is not half of 150. And saying it's "your job to get the eco" is fallacious; if you have the eco to support double the units, why not use it to support half the units, but make them good units, and have money left over for your buildings, city-states, rush-buys, and research agreements? Implying that you can field an equivalent hammer cost of landsknechts to longswords and just "get the eco" is outlandish.
On top of that, I'm not so sure 2 landsknechts beat one longsword. Yeah, it's two units with strength 10, but that doesn't mean that they're the same as one unit with strength of 20. If you have math or examples (with promotion/great general/terrain parity), I'd be happy to hear it though, since I'm not sure on that. Really though, there's
way too many confounding factors to do a straight-up hammer-per-strength equation like that and draw a conclusion of "A of unit B beats X of Y." I'd be willing to say that at a 1-to-3 ratio (hammer parity) they'd probably pull it off, but to get all three to deal damage to the LS, they're all attacking into it, meaning there's a good chance of fortification and terrain disadvantage. Plus, when you have weak units, you're much more likely to get one picked off, which then you obviously can't use again, whereas stronger units are more likely to survive to either 1) fortify until healed (or just get back the 1 or 2 hitpoints before being attacked again) 2) get to a city to heal or 3) insta-heal. This is especially true when you take ranged units/city bombardment into account.
Then of course there's the maintenance aspect, which we already covered, and the fact that with 1UPT, congestion is a huge issue - sure, you have 30 strength between your three Landsknechts vs the 18 on the Longsword (and of course I've already pointed out how that equivocation is flawed), but once you have five Longswords vs. 15 Landsknechts, well, good luck getting all of those guys attacking per turn. Good luck getting more than five attacking per turn, in fact. And then there's the fact that, as you said, your siege (
very important) is going to be delayed, as is your finding iron to make the siege, on account of you going down a completely unrelated tech path. And the amount of experience you're giving your enemy by letting them rack up the kills, which they can then use to get an even greater strength advantage, or just insta-heal and go back to the beatdown.
Anyways, point is your premise of "Landsknechts have more strength per hammer than Longswords, and therefore are superior" doesn't really hold water. I'll say again that they
can be a useful unit, but they're nothing great, and just one more piece of the mediocre tapestry that is Civ V Germany. And in a game where no civ is really hands down bad, being mediocre is
not a good thing.
Honestly, it would make more sense if they were 22 strength Longswords or something; the AoE III interpretation of their being heavy infantry was FAR more accurate.
