I looked at the original concept of Combat; everything was great in terms of skills:
1st branch - Sign of the Cursed + Devilish Strike
2nd branch - Watch + Triple Watch + Readiness
3rd branch - Reinforcement + Stun
What skill is 'Reinforcement'?
The new concept actually fixes a core issue in ToTe, which is that Might & Magic heroes deal the same amount of melee damage.
With the new structure, melee heroes that have Combat always pick the middle perk, "Martial Arts," which increases average damage by 50%.
The only thing that could be problematic was Triple Watch. But instead of removing a good skill, it would have been better to simply improve the other competing skills.
For example, increase Devilish Strike to 100% chance (i.e., always double damage).
Increase Stun to 50%.
The logic of the skill is flawed (with various random skills like +1/+1). Moreover, in a prolonged game, Triple Watch is not dangerous.
The second question is technical. As I understand it, for all Factions, from a logistical point of view, grass is native terrain; the rest have a fixed 25% penalty. Was this penalty left only for the "Pathfinding" skill? That is, are there no problems with setting a 0% penalty?
I cannot translate the question very well, so I will just say how logistics works.
All types of terrains have a 25% penalty for everyone except grass.
To compensate for this, all roads on all terrains except grass have a 0% penalty.
The grass road has a 25% penalty.
"Pathfinding" reduces this penalty by 75%, so the penalty becomes 6.25%.