Very good article Christ.
I think the main point Christ emphasizes, as Fall explained a bit more, is not how you should always fight pure palas vs halbs, it is rather about the power of ultimate strong gold army built with a solid eco. When/if you can achieve that, pala vs halb cost effectivity issue becomes an irrelevant discussion, especially in a tg. As long as you build a strong gold army, you do win most of your fights, even if you lose some of them vs trash units, the damage is almost completely recoverable. You can always push and can dominate map control with solid armies, whereas with thrash units all you can do is win a few fights cost effectively, which pretty much means nothing most of the time for a decent post-imperial game. The main message there I think that some of the time, of course not in very high level games, RMers tend to avoid such fights just to be cost effective, eventhough the fight would allow them to have a strong gain in many other perspectives. It is also understandable that what is suggested is a debatable issue and can be hard to implement or judge how to be used and requires alot of practice to be perfectly employed. Even in the DM, where post imperial is all that there is, it was after many years of AOC, this strategy evolved to be one of the finest and most decent one by the contribution of many players.
For the 80 farms issue, I am not very experienced in early-imp RM, but from DM point of view, this strategy can also have a lot of effect in 1vs1 late-post imperial games. We have experienced, more than enough, that for those civs that can create cheap gold units, it is most of the time effective to use them instead of thrash units. For example, in a viking, celt, teuton etc 1v1s, where gold is finished, you can mass berserkers, woad raiders or TKs of 60-70 by selling food, instead of 120-130 trash units of sc,halb and skirm.
I think the main point Christ emphasizes, as Fall explained a bit more, is not how you should always fight pure palas vs halbs, it is rather about the power of ultimate strong gold army built with a solid eco. When/if you can achieve that, pala vs halb cost effectivity issue becomes an irrelevant discussion, especially in a tg. As long as you build a strong gold army, you do win most of your fights, even if you lose some of them vs trash units, the damage is almost completely recoverable. You can always push and can dominate map control with solid armies, whereas with thrash units all you can do is win a few fights cost effectively, which pretty much means nothing most of the time for a decent post-imperial game. The main message there I think that some of the time, of course not in very high level games, RMers tend to avoid such fights just to be cost effective, eventhough the fight would allow them to have a strong gain in many other perspectives. It is also understandable that what is suggested is a debatable issue and can be hard to implement or judge how to be used and requires alot of practice to be perfectly employed. Even in the DM, where post imperial is all that there is, it was after many years of AOC, this strategy evolved to be one of the finest and most decent one by the contribution of many players.
For the 80 farms issue, I am not very experienced in early-imp RM, but from DM point of view, this strategy can also have a lot of effect in 1vs1 late-post imperial games. We have experienced, more than enough, that for those civs that can create cheap gold units, it is most of the time effective to use them instead of thrash units. For example, in a viking, celt, teuton etc 1v1s, where gold is finished, you can mass berserkers, woad raiders or TKs of 60-70 by selling food, instead of 120-130 trash units of sc,halb and skirm.