Unless the guy who did all the EB EDU balancing is still active on the EB2 forum, my bet is, we will never know.
One thing to ponder: if you flatly remove 4 attack from the elite spear units (spartan for example), they become noticeably weaker than sword elites.
Also, most sword units in EB have either the ap attribute (curved swords: luso, pedites, thorakitai hoplitai, Hypas...), or 0.225 lethality (barbarians, maures: the longswords), and are far from underpowered, so it MIGHT be that the whole EDU was balanced with this light_spear thing, or not.
Some say that tighter formations make up for the loss of lethality, not sure about it.
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