Quote Originally Posted by alpaca
However I want to throw another point into the discussion: Since soldiers are playing attack and death animations, and soldiers don't really die before finishing their death animation, there probably is an influence of the actual animation length to the unit's performance, and I think this could be what Palamedes meant when he once talked about good and bad animations in conjunction with unit performance. It's like "meh I just stabbed someone, gimme a break"
This could explain my experience that slow 2h axe units have a worse performance than sword or 1h axe units.
Well, as I did a lot of billmen vs swords test I had to do a lot of idly staring at both movesets, and I'm not sure there's any clear speed advantage either way. Both movesets have fast attacks and slow attacks, protracted finishers and quick "bang, you're dead" ones in about equal measure. The swords do look faster on cursory glance because they seem to be able to cue a lot of slashes in a row but 1) they only do so when said slashes are parried/blocked ; and blocked/interrupted bill strikes also result in a flurry of bill moves sometimes and 2) swords seem to have more long finishers, when bill strike have a long preparation before the strike (arming their blow) but once the move is fired, it's very quick and the enemy keels over almost instantly.
Of course, short of obsessively spelunking in the animation files there's no clear way to know the proportion of fast to slow anims, their precise timing, or even if all anims are used in equal proportions, but from what I've seen they more or less even out. At least, when comparing sword+shield Vs 2h axe, but I'm not about to crosscheck every moveset. Even chronic anal retention has its limits .

The discrepancy Palamedes mentionned might have been this "quick attack, slow death" vs "long protracted attack, quick death" ? But that's not to say it's a discrepancy inter-units, could be intra-unit as well (this billman using anim A is more efficient that that billman using anim B). But if all anims are used in equal amounts, this wouldn't matter.

Has anyone witnessed attacks being actually interrupted ? I.e. one soldier is about to strike an enemy, but a second enemy cuts him down before he finishes ? If so, then that may be a point against longer attacks (I've never ever seen a soldier be attacked mid-finisher, nevermind killed)...but wether it's really significant is doubtfull in my book. But I'll setup another batch of these tests, this time using the vaunted über JHI anim, just to be sure.

In the meantime, I'd theorize that as of 1.2, 2H suck 1-on-1 because they have generally much lower defense (-4/6 for no shield, -3 for no sword parry bonus) and higher skeletal compensation (skimmed over the vanilla unit file, 2Hers are on the whole in the 1.25 - 1.35 range, all 1H axes/maces 1.2, all swords/pikes/halberds are 1) than 1Hers, coupled with the fact that their mass+charge bonus are usually not high enough to make up for them in sheer charge kills.

Wether that state of affairs is OK or not is another matter - after all, if they performed the same as their 1H+Shield counterparts there wouldn't be much point to them. Right now they're mainly tools suited to charge flanks/rear like so much cheap-and-slow cav, and to form a second line behind the main battleline, opportunistically charging in gaps/weak points. Using them as linemen is suicidal.
"Is that what we want them to be/what they historically were ?" is the real question.