Quote Originally Posted by Ars Moriendi
You know what I'd like to see, balancing-wise ?
A new stat added to all units, something like "attack speed" or "attack skill" that should reflect that unit's animation speed/effectiveness. That will be really helpfull both for the player (who'll be better informed about his soldiers potential before testing them in battle) and for the AI (who'll be better guided in selecting what to train and deciding the outcome of auto-calc battles more accurately).
This new stat shouldn't, of course, have any other effect on the battlefield.

I think something like this will make the balancing easier, bypassing some of the problems with the current stats/animation/cost system (see Zatoichi's post above for an example of a cause-effect chain propagating simple changes to other areas of the game).

The big problem is - I don't think a new stat could be added even by a patch, let alone modding. Maybe the next game engine.
It would be better if they just standardized the attack speed of all animations, so that you could look at the stats and know which unit was better at a glance.