Please consider doing the following before focussing fully on CoW1.5. Because otherwise when CoW1.5 is ready, you won't be able to properly assess whether you want to keep CoW1.0 or not. CoW1.0 is wasting some of its potential as long as the following changes are not done.
I restrain myself to tweaks that don't require any coding, since it's logical you don't want to invest implementation effort in CoW1.0 as long as CoW1.5 is in the making:


* Reduce food costs of infantry clearly while increasing its manpower costs slightly - see --> this post <--. Sorry for annoying you often with that one - it's just so very important.

* Make fighters offensive and strats defensive in air combat. See --> this thread <--.

* Increase gold costs of rare materials from 0.5 to 1.0 gold per unit rare materials. Since the resource balancing update and the earlier availability of higher technologies, a big research advantage can be bought with gold. Which is OK, but that should be costly. And this flaw of too cheap rare materials makes doing so all too easy / makes other gold options unattractive. Put it this way: Who should ever buy 5000 food, goods, steel or oil for 2500 gold, if you can also get 5000 rares for the same price?
This flaw is corrupting the otherwise very good balancing from the research balancing update.


Please at least give these three changes a chance in front-pioneer games.

It's possible that the last of the three changes requires a little bit of coding, that I cannot tell for sure. But the first two no, definitely not. They can be done in 5 minutes.
The three changes are not "changes in mechanics" (as you call them) that need to be "balanced by something else", but essentially are balancing improvements.

Of course it's true that balancing in CoW is very complex, because (as freezy once described it) each rock/paper/scissors relation between three units can be regarded as a triangle, while each of the corners of each triangle is at the same time also a corner of another triangle. Thus the units form a fragile network and if you move the corner of one triangle, this has a more or less direct affect on the power of most other units. Additionally there's resource balancing also having an effect on all units and thus giving it an additional level of complexity.
Having all of that in mind, it still appears obvious to me that these three changes don't have negative side-effects. Been thinking them through for months and always came to the same conclusion. If you nevertheless find a problem with them, I'd appreciate if you would name it. But a general "every change might create an imbalance", as I may translate your remark, doesn't help further in a constructive sense.