Balancing upgrade cost

[alpaca]

Well i found a few quite interesting issues about unit experience in 1.6 (BI) which is the same as RTW 1.5

What I wanted to test is the effects of experience upgrades vs armor vs weapon upgrades in custom battles for balancing Chivalry: TW, so I made a simple test setup got someone to help me:
Test runs with Feudal Foot Knights, their stats are:

mount_effect     horse -8
attributes       sea_faring, hide_forest, hardy, cantabrian_circle 
formation        1.2, 1.8, 2.2, 2.6, 3, square
stat_health      1, 0
stat_pri         4, 5, no, 0, 0, melee, simple, piercing, sword, 10 ,0.6
stat_pri_attr    no
stat_sec         0, 0, no, 0, 0, no, no, no, none, 25 ,0.5
stat_sec_attr    no
stat_pri_armour  9, 6, 3, metal
stat_sec_armour  0, 0, flesh
stat_heat        0
stat_ground      0, 0, 0, 0
stat_mental      10, impetuous, highly_trained
stat_charge_dist 40

The test setup was the following (A=Armor upgrade, W=Weapon upgrade, E=Experience upgrade):
- Reference tests with 0 upgrades vs 1,2,3A
- 2,3E vs 1,2,3A
- 2,3W vs 1,2,3A

The results were quite insatisfying because the guys with the weapon upgrades won every encounter while the experience upgraded units even lost some of the fights against their armored opponents (namely 2,3E lost against 3A), the reference units lost all their fights.

What this means is that the effect of experience is, while not neglectable, not as large as you'd think. An armor upgrade of the same level is presumably just as strong (I didn't test often enough to be sure there) and a weapon upgrade is in this setup (attack small compared to defence) always better.


What's even worse is that I also tested this for archers (missile attack) and in that setup experience upgrade had NO effect at all (I am quite sure there because I tested this a lot).
I assume this is a bug because the details scroll states they become stronger.


Now what this means for balancing is that while experience upgrades have a fixed price, weapon upgrades should probably be quite a bit more expensive than xp and armor upgrades should cost about the same.
You're welcome to comment on that and test yourselves of course ;)