The idea is if you heal a unit form 1 HP, you are essentially saving the whole cost of that unit. This makes unit regeneration bonuses a passive source of resource generation. Here is a list of resource regain rate for all units that regenerate.
It’s challenging to make a direct comparison like this, because regeneration essentially serves a completely different purpose on low HP units compared to high HP units. A low HP unit will only regenerate for a fraction of the time.
If you consider, for example, regenerating camel archers, that regeneration isn’t going to make any difference to focused skirmisher fire, it primarily just makes you more resistant to Siege. It essentially gives you a few freebies on mistakes. Which, to be fair, can make or break a game, but I don’t think it would be accurate to describe it in terms of economic benefit.
The role it serves in elephants is completely different, because they have so much HP to begin with. That’s the only place where the long-term economic benefit can really come into play, because they are the only ones that have a reasonable chance of actually surviving that long.
Or to put it another way, even with regeneration, you don’t want your camel archers taking any damage. By contrast, regeneration on elephants basically tells you that you should be taking damage in order to maximize their utility.
I think you underestimated that particular tech, that in late game multi-frontline scenarios, it is much harder to focus fire with skirms (and therefore chip damage becomes much more frequent)
Also knights and camels do frequent chip damage to CAs in general due to the inability to chase down individual CAs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means saying it’s bad, I’m more emphasizing that the benefit here can’t be broken down too effectively into an ECONOMIC bonus. Broadly speaking, the less HP a unit has, the more true that’ll be.
It’s like…viewed in a technical sense, an elite berserk can kill an infinite number of skirmishers, as long as they come one at a time. But that’s obviously an unrealistic assessment of the power of their regeneration, right? Because that’s not how fights actually go. But if it had 740hp instead of 74, it’d be far more realistic to call it an economic bonus, because it could survive actual fights and regenerate after.
It’s very context dependent. You might be tempted, for example, to say that the time Dravidians get the greatest benefit from Medical Corps is in the extreme late game, when they’ve got a critical mass of elephant archers, right? Because that’s when the technical economic benefit is maximized. But at that point the only thing you’ll actually WORRY about is mangonels or bombards, which will bypass the regeneration entirely.
On the other hand, I think a rough estimate would make sense, I would imagine a % of the number shown above would be the effective resource gain (which I’d also expect to be a function of micro skills and game length)
Kinda? The thing is, it’s like the difference between a food collection bonus for hunt, versus a food collection bonus for Farms. The one can be perfectly balanced at 40%, while the other would be overpowered at 20%.