Taking care of other people work is the least one can do.

Personally I don't like vision range increases from phasing up or promoting in rank. I simply don't see why a city-dweller ought to be able to see further than a villager, or why an older soldier further than a young one.
Why not have vision ranges which remain constant throughout the game?

In D894#34853, @fatherbushido wrote:

Taking care of other people work is the least one can do.

This is the reason my balance proposals contain small but focused changes in respect of the previously balance concept ( no hard counter system oriented ), in order to prevent exploits abuse from players.

In D894#34857, @Nescio wrote:

Personally I don't like vision range increases from phasing up or promoting in rank. I simply don't see why a city-dweller ought to be able to see further than a villager, or why an older soldier further than a young one.

This feature is meant to be gameplay wise as long as this game isn't a simulator, actually most of organic units have higher vision range than buildings which are supposed to have better vision while scouting the zone from the top of a building than units on foot exploring the map.

Why not have vision ranges which remain constant throughout the game?

Having archers with lower vision range than their max attack range in phase 1 and phase 2 makes performing rush harder without the help of buildings like outpost designed to control a wide area of the map and makes defending be easier. Matter of fact expanding and/or simply controlling map should be part of a viable strategy even without gaining advantage from cavalry rush.
Exploring the map will be interesting and shortening overall attack range and vision of units will give the illusion of playing on a bigger map.
Since ranged units are obviously overpowered compared to melee units and having them shooting at lower range would help players to consider to train melee units more often instead of having an army composed by ranged units only (indeed my vision of the gameplay is influenced by my multiplayer experiences). I won't take care about infantry / cavalry skirmishers accuracy in this patch because not related but it would help to proper suit the balance.

In D894#34871, @Grugnas wrote:

In D894#34853, @fatherbushido wrote:

Taking care of other people work is the least one can do.

This is the reason my balance proposals contain small but focused changes in respect of the previously balance concept ( no hard counter system oriented ), in order to prevent exploits abuse from players.

La cantatrice calva?

In D894#34857, @Nescio wrote:

Personally I don't like vision range increases from phasing up or promoting in rank. I simply don't see why a city-dweller ought to be able to see further than a villager, or why an older soldier further than a young one.

This feature is meant to be gameplay wise as long as this game isn't a simulator, actually most of organic units have higher vision range than buildings which are supposed to have better vision while scouting the zone from the top of a building than units on foot exploring the map.

Why not have vision ranges which remain constant throughout the game?

Having archers with lower vision range than their max attack range in phase 1 and phase 2 makes performing rush harder without the help of buildings like outpost designed to control a wide area of the map and makes defending be easier. Matter of fact expanding and/or simply controlling map should be part of a viable strategy even without gaining advantage from cavalry rush.
Exploring the map will be interesting and shortening overall attack range and vision of units will give the illusion of playing on a bigger map.
Since ranged units are obviously overpowered compared to melee units and having them shooting at lower range would help players to consider to train melee units more often instead of having an army composed by ranged units only (indeed my vision of the gameplay is influenced by my multiplayer experiences). I won't take care about infantry / cavalry skirmishers accuracy in this patch because not related but it would help to proper suit the balance.

The argument would have been:
"There is then the issue of range/vision consistency (refs Attack, Heal, UnitAI)."
That implies having the whole picture in mind (And also other things).

In D894#34874, @fatherbushido wrote:

The argument would have been:
"There is then the issue of range/vision consistency (refs Attack, Heal, UnitAI)."
That implies having the whole picture in mind (And also other things).

Take archer units: they have 60 attack max range and 40 vision range in phase 1. In phase 3 they will have 60 attack max range and 64 vision range. Elite Rank archers in phase 3 will have 68 attack max range and 72 vision range.
All units have higher or equal vision range than their attack range in phase 3. Which consistency do you refer to?

Although I'm not opposed to lowering infantry archer maximum range to 60, I think it would be a bad idea to reduce vision range below that. If units are attacked, they ought to be allowed to see by whom or at least from where they're attacked.

In D894#34880, @Nescio wrote:

Although I'm not opposed to lowering infantry archer maximum range to 60, I think it would be a bad idea to reduce vision range below that. If units are attacked, they ought to be allowed to see by whom or at least from where they're attacked.

This situation happens only while attacking because the defender can train archers (ptols, mauryans, carthage, persia) and have vision of the attacker only if there is any melee unit in phase 1 (otherwise they are forced to move at vision range distance). In my opinion this defender "surprise effect" is interesting.
Attacker can see from where the arrows are coming from.
Although those opinions, a vision range going down from 80 to 60 is barely noticeable.

In D894#34883, @Grugnas wrote:

Although those opinions, a vision range going down from 80 to 60 is barely noticeable.

This is not true; a vision range of 80 means a vision area of π*80*80=20106 and a vision range of 60 means a vision area of π*60*60=11310; so a 25% vision range reduction means a 7/16=43.75% area reduction, which, I think, is certainly noticeable.
Lowering it further to 40 effectively reduces vision area by 75% to just 25%.

As i said in the forum, i believe now that this kind of patches is useless: it would be more useful to do a patch which uses relative ranges for all units and structures (first without any changes in the final ranges to allow an easy and non controversial review, and then (and only then) play with ranges. That would make changes somewhat trivial (as scaling globaly all ranges by modifying only one factor, or nerfing the range of one unit compared the another ones also with only one change) instead of this range patch which has to modify all templates with some probable controversial discussions on each modifications, and which certainly will have to be redone by all mods wanting to change them, or even for vanilla game when we introduce new features.

mimo, e.g.:
template_unit.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range>50</Range>
</Vision>

template_unit_cavalry.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range op="mul">1.84</Range> <!-- makes 92 -->
</Vision>

template_unit_champion_cavalry.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range op="mul">1.92</Range> <!-- makes 96 -->
</Vision>

template_unit_champion_infantry.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range op="mul">1.68</Range> <!-- makes 84 -->
</Vision>

template_unit_infantry.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range op="mul">1.6</Range> <!-- makes 80 -->
</Vision>

template_unit_support.xml:

<Vision>
  <Range op="mul">0.64</Range> <!-- makes 32 -->
</Vision>

etc.

Yes, i think something like that would help and would be quite useful for future modifications.
But as it is quite a heavy template editing, would be better to have a second opinion from other devs before starting it.

If other people think something like that would be desirable, I believe I could make a patch for it. I've done something similar in my mod (0abc, which goes much further, and implements a new template structure tree).

In D894#34930, @mimo wrote:

As i said in the forum, i believe now that this kind of patches is useless: it would be more useful to do a patch which uses relative ranges for all units and structures (first without any changes in the final ranges to allow an easy and non controversial review, and then (and only then) play with ranges.

Ok, indeed this patch didn't consider such changes and those weren't even in the main purpose of this patch.