A Thought on Units and Reforms.

[Kikaz]

Imo yours is too much a "romanized" view of an empire: for example the Pahlava found they couldn't rely too much on their hellenic subjects and sticked to their own warfare...
Persians earlier on, exploited subjects' capabilities to their fullest...

Not to mention those roman reforms, came from disastrous defeats and not due to power (well not directly), besides it's not like they revolutionized warfare, they simply adopted better ways, something all those "lesser" factions already had, but lacked either wealth or political unity...

The only reform for those factions, that I could think of, is a centralization or confederation of power, coupled with the adoption of administrative/bureaucratic apparati (but it's something that happened, but usually ended with the death of its artificer or the people just rejected, so it's something that the team has to decide whether to script both, make a choice or avoid it completely :P)...

Bottom line, reforms happened in times of crisis and not of success...
What we have in the game, is land and resources in surplus, that enables the factions to implement expensive equipment in greater numbers...

In real-life yes, that is mostly when reforms happen, not so in RTW/EB (which aren't always "reforms" per se). However, my point is that a faction would seek to use better equipment as it becomes more available and affordable (or even the opposite for that matter).

@Kikaz

The overriding problem with any reforms for other factions is that such reforms need to be historically accurate, otherwise it wouldn't really be EBII. Hopefully the work we have done on the Celtic reforms in EBII should be an improvement over those in EB. Thanks to the MTWII engine it is now possible to illustrate the Celtic reforms better than was possible in EB. EBII will have three stages of reform (the one you start with and then two which will occur if you complete certain criteria). Thus you will see you armies become more heavily armed and armoured as time passes, also in order to better reflect the changes in Celtic society your armies composition will also change. There will also be a substantial amount of information to accompany each Gallic and British reform which should hopefully illustrate that Celtic armies did undergo substantial changes, in some cases as dramatic as those of the Roman military (said the researcher with a sense of arrogance). There will also be changes in the way your Celtic families are organised; some will become monarchies, thus you will need to ensure you mark out which FM you want to inherit the throne, whilst others will rely on FMs having certain characteristics to ensure that they become the FL (thus character development will play a larger part in Celtic factions than it previously had done).

I hope that helps.

Well, a game like EB isn't actually going to be historically accurate unless the player really wants it to; it's the environment that's historically accurate, and when an environment changes in an ahistorical way through gameplay, there should be some change that could be added with a disclaimer like "well based on X, if Y were to happen this would likely be the result (X being a historic example, Y being a likely alternative event that results from player-intervention)."

But, getting to the meat of your post, what you've said here sounds like very good news! I think I had forgotten about how the armor upgrades from MWII would be utilized by the team; and beyond that it looks like the team is using the other additional features of MWII to full effect, the family member changes particularly.