Turin,

I think that you have made a good suggestion. There needs to be some way to limit elite troops, and cost alone is not enough to do it in the current system. Since we can't have hastati becoming principe (game mechanics don't allow it), then making elite troops take longer to train would be a good mechanism.

No matter how expensive and long it takes to train elite troops, you know that there will always be a temptation to use them, at least a unit here and there :-)

Hunter