Current balance of normal units

[Arnuz]

Cavalry
Not using these but I'm unsure if that's not just bad play on my part. In theory they are pretty good, high movement allows staying safe while I cast combat spells to kill enemy units, and allows responding to enemy stacks faster. The problem might be that they aren't good enough to fight common summons, and that's what the AI uses. Or just the more generic "production goes into settlers and infrastructure, for battles there are summoned creatures" early game problem. You definitely need the settlers and buildings, so producing units is difficult.

Cavalry, thanks to first strike, can finish off that rare with 1hp left at the end of the fight for you, much better than spearmen.

I don't use halberdiers much either. Too slow to attack, and both overkill and useless at the same time in most garrisons...

[Catwalk]

Why compare Cavalry to Spearmen? And why would a unit be useless and overkill at the same time?

[Arnuz]

Overkill because what it can do can be done by swordsmen more or less, unless it's attacking, then it's too slow, so useless ;(

I missed some posts... Nelphine: troll magicians have the issue that they move 2, unlike other races' so that's a rather hard nerf. Their sturdiness motivates that though.

[Nelphine]

Same reason I use spearmen as garrisons and never upgrade them.

If you can fight something off with halberdiers, you can fight it off with spearmen most of the time. 

If you can't fight it off with spearmen, halberdiers are probably too slow to beat them. So, overkill due to higher cost (and triggering stronher attacks), yet useless.

No idea about cavalry vs spearmen.

[Nelphine]

As a note, I consider halfling swordsmen a racial unit. If I'm playing a buff strategy including heroism, they're actually very good.

Arnuz, troll magicians: yes that supports my point.

[Catwalk]

I've been defending succesfully against large stacks of Nagas recently with dwarf halberdiers this last game. Swordsmen would have succumbed quickly, Spearmen would have been useless (assuming dwarves had any). Why does it have to be one or the other?

[Nelphine]

That's a +1 HP halberdier. Also, high resistance vs a poison unit. But generally, I wouldn't bother with the garrison, I would just send a stack of halberdiers out, crush the all the roaming naga stacks, and kill the AI. Which allows me to garrison with spearmen. So overkill to garrison with halberdiers.

[Seravy]

Well, halberdiers are supposed to be strong against cavalry...but I don't think I've seen the AI use cavalry that often. They are required to go fighter's guild first, so they have halberdiers unlocked before they can even think about building a stables.

[Nelphine]

I think that's probably a source of a lot of this.

You need halberdiers to compete with summons. You've taught the AI that humans will provably use summons. Therefore they go straight to halberdiers, making spear/swords/bow/cavalry mostly obsolete.

Which I think is why most of us find those units not relevant.

But you can't change that with out weakening summons. Which you can't do if the human can quickly get halberdiers. So those 4 units are likely just going to stay mostly obsolete except in rare cases.

(You also can't really strengthen any if those 4 units, without encroaching on halberdiers. So they must stay weak, despite catwalks suggestion to increase them.)

[Nelphine]

Basically:
Cavalry, bowmen, spearmen, swordsmen are required to set the baseline for everything else. So even though those 4 end up (mostly) pointless in game, they're very important to the meta game to give us our baselines.