[Sombre]

I don't think it really flattens the units out too much. I mean it's not like it makes the elite units any less elite. It just makes them cost more if they were stupid powerful. And the crappy low end units need something to make them more attractive or they will /never/ be useful. Actually even at 9 or 8 gold instead of 10 some units are still damn near useless - there's no real niche for units which are strictly inferior. Like for Mictlan in CB they raise the cost of the jaguar warriors considerably - that makes sense to me, since Jaguar warriors were cheap, available everywhere, sacred, low resource cost, even without bless were extremely powerful and hard to kill etc etc. The end result being that in vanilla /no-one/ could use sun warriors without handicapping themselves. By making jags less uber, at least people might think about using sun warriors if the situation suites them. So there you have a unit restored to its niche role (against massed shortbows, if you have tons of resources, if you want an earth/blood bless etc) and hopefully more variety.

The item costing I honestly don't know about. If you say they made bad mistakes changing the costs there I can't disagree, I don't have enough experience with forging.

I like the fact that some truly awful summons were reduced in gem costs. I mean who would ever use reanimation at its old cost? It might as well not have been in the game. I also like the changes to the scales, since stuff like the magic scale just didn't make sense to me in vanilla.

You don't like it, I'd still like to know more, but if you're talked out about it that's cool. I'm going to stick with it, maybe work out which bits work which bits don't for myself.