Elite Dacian skirmishers... overpriced???

[bobbin]

It wasn't the best option available. In fact, turning what should be great units into utterly crappy units by making them so cost-ineffective is inexcusable. INEXCUSABLE.

If they wanted to force players not to build too many of these elites (perhaps a dubious proposition in itself, but I'm not here to debate that), the best options would have been some combination of 1) taking multiple turns to recruit the units, 2) severely restricting the recruiting area for the units, or 3) severely shrinking the unit sizes of the units. See, that took me all of 10 seconds, and I came up with 3 alternatives that are better than what they chose to do - make the units so grotesquely expensive that they SUCK. Make no mistake, a unit will always suck if it costs too much, irrespective of whatever fantastic stats it may have.

Not a dubious proposition if you intend to follow a little thing called reality.
As for you alternatives,
1) Doesn't restrict the numbers of elite units, allows you to support unrealistically large numbers of elite units.
2) We already do that, a lot. How did you not notice?
3) Tiny unit sizes have a major negative impact on a units performance in battle, it makes them way too susceptible to cavalry charges and missiles.

So surprise surprise, the only option that is a hard limit on unit numbers is cost (you can't build them if you have no money).

Maybe it's fun for you, but it's not fun for me because I simply am not allowed to build the cool units, and thus I have to play the entire game with cost-effective levy spears.

The only person not allowing you to recruit these units is yourself, stop acting like it is being imposed on you.

The designers of this mod had many skills and talents - many. They had imagination, they had historical knowledge, they had map-making skills and modeling skills, even musical skills. One thing they severely lacked was skill with balancing and numbers.

Listen, the whole point of this mod it to follow history as closely as possible, and you may have noticed that history is full of inequality. If you want a finely balanced game go play Starcraft and stop posting insults about people who know a hell of a lot more about the aim of this mod and how to accomplish it than you do.