Quote Originally Posted by [cF]Adherbal
But in RTW there is no such limit, so there is no point in buying weaker units. On top of that the speed difference between light (weaker) and heavy (stronger) infantry/cavalry is so small (and both insanely high) that this is nolonger an advantage worth considering. So why buy any weaker units at all if you can buy a whole army of stronger units ? Even if they have good counter-units that doesnt help much, because unless you know the enemy will buy 20 units of type A before the battle starts - so you can buy 10 or so units that counter type A - it is unlikely you will have enough counter units to deal with such a "spam" army.

So either you make the RPS values so extreme that a counter-unit can deal with 2 or 3 of the units it's supposed to counter, or you have to put an artificial number on each unit type/class. Until then the game will largely be decided by the army you buy, and not by the skill of the players.
We made the RPS in Samurai Wars for MTW/VI strong enough that a spear costing 400 is 2x stronger than the best cav which costs 1200. That cavalry unit runs 2x faster than the spear. The sword which is 2.5x stronger than the spear and 20% faster costs 1000. The sword can be killed by the arrows of an archer costing 500 or by the cav costing 1200. We set the money level to 10k which averages 625 per unit. This limits the number of elite units you can buy, and the game also has the 20% surcharge for more than 4 of one type. There are no battlefield upgrades to upset this balance in Samurai Wars, and purchased upgrades are not cost effective. At 10k it's not possible to buy an all cav or all sword army. You can skew your army to be about 50% cav or swords which keeps things interesting, but an army containing 25% of the counterunit should be viable.

This is the kind of playbalance design which Creative Assembly doesn't seem to have time to develop for the vanilla game. The 20% surcharge in MTW/VI on more than 4 of a single unit type was a hedge by the designer against imbalance. Samurai Wars is balanced well enough that it woud play fine without this surcharge feature. Since the kensai unit was impossible to properly balance in this engine, we eliminated it from the Samurai Wars online unit set. That Creative Assembly includes units in multiplayer that are impossible to balance tells you something about where they are when it comes to balancing.