Game Balance, or the lack there of.

[Durallan]

Prussian cavalry was among the best in terms of battlefield achievements during the 18th century and does in no way warrant a 'crappy' tag. The prime example would be the Battle of Rossbach.

As to historical realism, I'd like to point out that the TW games have never really been about recreating history and more about creating new histories. For a mod like NTW where the time scope is much smaller, I can understand having unit stats accurately based on historical performance, but for a game that takes place during a century it makes very little sense. Firstly we need to recognise the fact that the quality of units does not stay constant. An excellent example of this is the Prussian army that was propably the best in Europe during the mid 18th century, but by the end of the same century the Prussian army was outdated and in dire need of a reform. Perhaps if a certain quality stayed constant throughout the era, I would think about adjusting the unit to live up to those qualities. In terms of SP campaigns, I don't believe that just because for example Russian line was poorly trained historically, that it should be heavily reflected in their unit stats, especially if my Russians happened to be prosperous and well educated and could actually afford better training. After all we are very much dealing with alternative history and not recreations.

As it is I believe CA has done a good job with balancing the units and still providing stat variation, although that said, I can not understand why Sweden of all factions have oversized cavalry units?

I completely Agree. Actually instead of total realism, which can be left for mods, you can have some sort of modifier that bases your armies professionalism on how much you spend on your army compared to home projects, there is a way to choose how much you spend on research military and social production in a little strategy game called galactic civilizations 2. now while ETW is quite different you could use some sort of calculation to decide how professional your army was compared to others, like britain would have to concentrate on its navy as well as its army and thus maybe not have quite as high as a country like prussia who has no navy to begin with. And then this can all change during the game as you change your countries army navy make up or whatever. You could give the armies a slight bonus or penalty depending on what your doing, like if you want to spend alot of money on research one turn you get a small bonus to research and a small penalty to army upkeep or costs and vice versa, the idea would be to give each country bonuses and disadvantages to battles, that way a tiny provice's one army guarding it's city would be a force to be reckoned with and the larger nations would have to invest a little more, it would reduce a world war where every nation is at war possibly, anyway just a good idea I think.