RJV,

I think the battle speed and movement speed issues are tied to initial decisions made in the architecture by CA. I don't really think Activision had much input on them (purely unbridled speculation, of course.) The reasoning I have is that chance of a kill is one of the fundamentals in the attack and the attack ratings all seem to be tied together in some way. So I suspect the very base value being used is a bit too much--and/or the base level defense is too low. Base attack has a 0 to 63 range, ditto for defense and armour, while shields are 0 to 31. I'm not sure what happens with charge bonuses, and mount bonuses, etc. that exceed the 63 total. Notice how almost all base unit stats fall into the very low end of the ranges, yet we have very high kill rates? That strongly suggests that the overall base attack efficacy is too high (or base defense is too low.)

The speeds are tied to the animations and skeletons. There are several things I am seeing in the unit choices and skeletons that tell me this was all rushed. First, there are not all that many skeletons and from what I can tell they must take a lot of time to develop. This is why we have only two horse speeds (ignoring fatigue.) Second, there are some rather basic unit types that don't exist at all or that have been changed from historical contexts. The ones I am thinking of are primarily javelin units: British chariot archers were actually javelinmen according to Caesar, javelins were often used by elephant crew, and many barbarian infantrymen had both throwing spears (javelins) and thrusting spears--yet you can't make any of these units in the game without doing extensive modding. There are also allusions to other weapon types in the files that are currently absent.