Some of these ratings are somewhat inaccurate when compared to each other as I adjusted them to show power differences between tiers. Perhaps more granularity would be better or a rating for a piece then +-x for each tier like
pawn
rating: 3
base:+.5, +.3, .-2, -.5
I wanted to show that some pieces were more powerful at some tiers but not enough to justify a full point but I pushed it their anyway. But I do feel some pieces are useless except for a few edge cases which were too small to make the piece worth including like swordsman+ vs. skeleton- the promote makes little difference hence why its completely overshadowed by skeleton making it unusable in any high tier army not to mention how bad skeleton base is anyway. So in general I reserved that rating for pieces that are completely over shadowed by other pieces and also bad. A lot of combo pieces also suffer from this gravy and thundermage in particular (phoenix kinda) where there is little reason to not use +++ as it makes the entire combo better so I think breaking a design tenet and allowing side grades for these pieces is the best way to do it to make them not objectively better. Breaking a design tenet is not something anyone should do lightly and it might be better to leave it alone than break a tenet and simply take a few casualties in the form of pieces that make armies much worse by including them.