Wow, it seems like every thread, long enough, ends up in a comparison between editions nowadays
Might as well post my two clipped, debased copper pfennigs here.
For those who've seen my posts since my recent return, this might come as a surprise, but I actually think that in 6e, static CR was too dominant. I never liked it how the core mass ranked infantry was just there to provide static CR while trying to keep the enemy from farming kill CR off them (which meant that everyone and their pet dog used hw+shield, even dark spearelves at times). Only that there was a tipping point after which, if the enemy managed to amass that much killing power, he simply could overcome your static CR no matter what you did, making maneuver lose its significance.
Letting everything be steadfast if it's deeper than the enemy is, on the face of it, a buff for the mass ranked little guys. It gives them a way to obtain staying power that isn't effectively capped 6e style. That game design change means, though, that it must actually be possible to feasibly grind down such blocks in protracted combat, thus the need to increase the lethality of combat across the board. Something that has the additional, in my opinion beneficial, effect of making core infantry vs core infantry about something else than static CR, and things like weapon choices actually matter. Now, if only steadfast had been negatable by flanking...
Something else I didn't like about the 6e design was that if fighting against effectively unbreakable units, such as stubborn bodyguard units, maneuver became largely irrelevant. That lovely CR which you'd get from flanking would effectively count for nothing. 8e and onward, at least flanking enables you to kill more, as the flanking unit would get the benefit of second-rank support attacks, while the victim of the flanking would just get a few extra attacks.
It seems thus to me, from following the debate back and forth, that 8e had generally the right ideas, only they were executed poorly in a way that created new problems, like often happens when making fundamental overhauls. As far as I've gathered, it's the same with magic, in that the winds of magic system created a diminishing returns effect and made magic not be the all-or-nothing it was in earlier editions, but that various army-specific rules make it circumventable to such an extent that magic-heavy armies become even more unstoppable than ever.
So it seems to me like T9A has a fundamentally sound design, one whose issues are more a matter of fine-tuning than anything else.
