Don’t dig too much into what Ornlu says. He also thinks 65% winrate Chinese are in a good spot, considers Dravidians and urumis really strong and so on. A few months ago he made a video saying Japanese CA, Malay infantry armor bonus is OP while talking about power creep which is so far from the reality. Most of his statements come from the point where army has already been massed, yet game is even and stalemate fights are happening in the middle of the map. That’s always an incorrect way of looking at things. In general there are castles, siege, monks involved. Economic differences, cost, training time differences all matter more than actual stats on the units.
My take on the Leitis/Leiciai
First its a melee cavalry non-ranged unit without any bonus damage or conversion resistance. Thus in small numbers its vulnerable to conversions and at very later stages will die to halbs. Imo, castle based unique units need to be significantly stronger than their generic alternatives at some stage of the game to have a clear purpose. Otherwise its simply not worth going for multiple castles and taking that extra time to produce them.
Second, Lithuanians aren’t an economic powerhouse. They got some decent bonus but its very small on pure land maps and one of the least economic benefits relative to other civs, for any category of maps. Military bonus is also mediocre. The skirm bonus is decent against archer civs but bonus on cavalry is not for free and comes after relics are picked up. Given the situation of average economy, average military until after 30 mins, it makes a lot of sense to have a strong unit for the mid game to comeback into the game.
Third, performance of Lithuanians as a civ relative to others. When it comes to tournaments, consistently they have <50% winrates - Nobles Apartment Cup, Warlords 3, Hidden Cup 5 (28%), NAC 5. Quite average in terms of number of picks as well. Ladder - 47% winrate at 1900+ both Arabia only and overall, 48% at 1200+, consistently ranked 30th or worse in the past 18 months. All these indicate they’re a lower-mid tier civ or mid tier civ at best.
So if at all you want to nerf Leitis it has to be done in such a way that Lithuanians are significantly buffed otherwise and become quite a strong civ even when they can’t do unique units (like Georgians, Tatars) on some categories of maps.
And its much better to first nerf ridiculously overpowered units like Mangudai, organ gun belonging to civs with extremely good early eco and very strong military bonuses before reworking melee cav uu.