Something really needs to be done. HRE vs French has become impossible. HRE has nothing to answer French aside from a better eco, but what does that matter if your units are just trash? Arbaletriers are so incredibly overpowered without any way of counterplay except for Mangos, which die too easily to Knights and springalds, so they don’t actually do much and are such a big investment as well as immobilizer for your army, it’s terrible.
And then Relic even went ahead and buiffed the Arbaletrier… The counters to crossbows do barely anything against this ridiculous unit with their tons of armor but no heavy tag. The Arbaletrier might be the most ill balanced unit in the game, because it has direct and very effective strengths against their counters. Either nerf the Arb armor by a lot, allow horsemen to deal massively more dmg to them or tag them as heavy, so Crossbows can be the one unit to hard counter arbaletriers. How can a light unit have more armor than most heavy melee units and still be a light unit? Look at the insane trade off for the Landsknecht for having an aoe attack and then look at the zero trade offs for Arbaletriers… This unit is too strong in general, but it especially ruins the match up vs HRE, because it counters everything HRE can do plus HRE has a much worse feudal than French. And no unique units, techs, basic structure, only landmarks. Yada yada yada…
The HRE suffers from a reputation that was true long ago and has not yet been realized as the failed civ that it is.
In this thread there are quite some ideas for new unique units for HRE, which is a necessity unless you want to remove HRE from the game.
But there is more to be done. I think that quite an overhaul is in order for the HRE with significant changes for every stage of the game. The civ as it is is trapped due to having overtuned landmarks which supposedly justify to not give the civ anything else and also impede every chance of diversity and a variety of tactics. The civ stops existing in imperial age and is nothing but a basic unit civ that only has outstanding towers and nothing else.
It has not always been the case, but since every other civ has received a lot of changes, new mechanics, techs and units, the HRE is now the BY FAR worst desgined civ in the game.