Are the Romans too Powerful?

[Kobal2fr]

So...You complain that vanilla post-Marian Rome is woefuelly overpowered in terms of stats... he proves that Gauls are even MORE underpowered compared to even lower-end Roman troops in the supposedly better balanced acclaimed historical mods, and by huge margins too... and you conclude that thus these mods are the choice for balanced RTW SP ?

Am I being dense here and missing an obvious but unspoken logical step ?

EDIT :

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

As an aside, I do agree with you that most of MTW/RTW/M2TW units are just tweaks to the basic STW archetypal units, but what you acclaim as proper balance (ie : STW's "purity" through giving everyone exactly the same troops) is not balance at all. It's, specifically, avoiding the whole balancing idea alltogether. Besides, even back in STW the different clans weren't balanced at all anyway. You can't expect me to believe that "can field cheaper ashigaru" can possibly be construed as even remotely equivalent to "can zoom through the whole tech tree because castles are 25% cheaper". Or even "can field archers at the price of spearmen". But I digress.

I also agree that RTW's tentative to recreate the great cultural differences in warfare techniques (ie phalanx, legion, warbands, HAs, chariots etc...) was on the whole a bit of a failure, mostly because the AI used a "one size fits none" tactical decision process. i.e. it couldn't play their strengths or counterbalance their weaknesses worth a damn. It was a good idea that sadly didn't work out that well in it's application.

But I disagree on the fact that it's all because of the evil new engine, the new graphics or CA selling out and dumbing it down to a more "generic" RTS crowd.

Proof being that, as of version 1.2 and a bit of tweaking on the part of Lusted's LTC "mod" (which is less of a mod and more of a fine tuning of the vanilla game) M2TW battles, using the selfsame evil new engine, are very close in feel to STW/MTW ones, without suffering from many of their most annoying properties, like the aforementionned hour-long marathon battles against Egyptian triplestacks, with the reinforcements getting sent in peacemeal, exhausted and half-broken before they even reach your battleline. Or losing a battle because ONE enemy samurai yari wasn't dead or routed off the field before the clock runs out (no kidding. Happened to me when I ran the ol' Shoggy again while I was waiting for M2TW to be properly patched up. Needless to say I got a little... miffed at the time.)

And on a more global scale, M2TW factions are much closer to each other in terms of rosters than those of RTW, most having a common core (though wildly diverse in appearances) with a few faction-specific units that are in essence upgraded versions of said common core, emphasizing this or that tactical field for said faction - or, in STW terms, "can recruit +1 honour No-Dachi". Only, you know, with different unit models as well.