Should buff cards affect tags not specific units?

Before TAD where there were not that many units, it is possible for some cards to effect only units listed. Like “cavalry combat” actually only affects hussar and dragoon, and team cards need to list all counterparts for all civs.
But now every unit class has tons of units and a finer tag system is introduced for convenience of writing effects (mostly for arsenal techs and team cards) should such cards affect all units with the tag? E.g. hand cavalry combat affects all hand cavalry (not hussars and cuirassiers), musketeer combat affect all musket infantry (not just musketeer).

That would cause some balancing problems perhaps, but (1) this mostly affects natives and mercs which are not availavle in large amounts, and some civs already benefit from more universal effects (2) I actually feel the old cards are coded just for convenience (not intentionally balanced) at a stage where most civs do not have access to a lot of natives and mercs, and there are not many unit types.

That is to say if you just introduce 2 new musketeers like in TAD, it is more convenient to just add them to the list that the card affects. In addition you only have 2 other merc musketeers that one would not use a lot so buffing them or not does not really have a huge impact.
But now that you have 10 more new regular musketeers and 10 new mercs, adding a new tag to them would be more convenient.

I think it’s a combination of the two reasons:

  1. Mercs and Natives
  2. They just didn’t get to updating those cards yet.

There are hundreds of cards in the game. And it’s easy to make a mistake there and not notice it. Remember when they buffed Pet Jaguars instead of Jaguar Warriors once?

The fist reason might be the stronger one. They are afraid of changing that because it could have unforeseen effects in the future.
Imagine they make a merc update where mercs become a lot more viable and reliable and suddenly those earlier changes make them OP.

it has always been a balancing and design question, not really due to tag limitations, well for some of them anyway.

Like brit cav cards are different in that its all cav all the time so the other civs not affecting all cav was a design decision

arguably some of the decisions can be changed, the devs changed the spanish cav combat to affect goons as well, before it was just huss and lancers

the German cards only affect uhlans and war wagons while the french ones are more global

Dutch has infantry combat cards that only affect dutch barracks units while haud infantry cards are global ( the reason i have seen argued is to not have triple carded grens)

Asian civs are much more specifically designed so that question is moot.

another more recent case is arguably malta vs spain , where as the spanish combat cards affect foot archers and hand infantry globally, the maltese ones only affect crossbow and pikes, which arguably is a good thing, the spanish change also happened relatively recently as well

There are some cases that could be changed

  • French long range infantry hitpoint could be changed to all infantry - heavy infantry
  • same with the german one

the rest arguably have their reasons and are already tag based

  • the port one is already specific to gunpowder troopers so no point in changing that
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