In your example, don't forget that militia are polearms - big bonus vs cavalary, and armor piercing IIRC, which is going to be big trouble for something like lancers. It's kind of innately skewed towards the polearms, upgraded or not.


Anyway, While raising valour is certainly a good idea in SP games, it's not as important as it would be in an MP game. There are a number of reasons for this.

For one (and a real big one it is), you can't just buy valour - at best, you can get +1 if you hold a province with a bonus and produce it their. That's all. It's all well and good to use a 4 valour militia instead of a 1 valour lancer, but if all you can produce is either a 1 valour lancer or a 1 valour militia, the choice becomes much simpler - in the opposite direction.

Secondly, there are other considerations. Take weapon/armor upgrades - in multi, you have to buy these for each individual unit. In single player, once you pay the cost to build the armourer/metalsmith, the actual upgrades are free. There are also morale upgrading churches, which aren't available at all in multiplayer. And of course, the ever popular generals. A 9 star gives all your units +4 valour, (albiet without the morale bonus) and it starts to make the actual valour of the unit hard to get and nearly irrelevant vs all the other bonuses you can stack on a unit.


Mostly though, in SP what it comes down to is that it's far, far easier to obtain a fully upgraded teched up unit then it is to get a valoured-up low grade unit. The only really easy ways to get valour works for either high tech or low tech. So why would you go low tech?