UNIT - Creature Balance + Visual Changes

I agree with increasing the range to 6 tiles, but then they need to be weakened to compensate for the buff. Or just leave them as they are.

The problem is that the alternate archer is much stronger. If you weaken the archers "to compensate for the buff," how will they catch up to the alternate archer? This approach is possible if you also nerf the alternate archer. But if you nerf the alternate archer, then it's not necessary to increase the range to 6 when upgrading the building, and even more so, it's not necessary to weaken the upgrade stats.

But how can you consider the statistics of Half-RTA when it's an incomplete, cut-down game – it's just a tournament! There's no long playthrough, weekly progress, tactics, and strategy, and many other things, especially since it has a built-in duel mode!
The fact that Half-RTA is used in tournaments is not an indicator. Also, look at the number of players. http://forum.heroesleague.ru/
It's clear that Half-RTA is not very popular, losing out to the original version, Tribes of the East 3.1.

May this mod achieve the same popularity as RTA, which a whole community has been working on for many years! ))
In reality, RTA is a successful and long-lasting mod, unlike one-off mods.
Yes, it's a "duel" game, and the unit balance in pairs has its own specifics (different from the situation in a standard game), but nevertheless, the most obvious imbalances are clearly visible, and moreover, they are repeated in the "full-fledged" tournament version of Tribes of the East. Again, you can filter out the imbalances (as I did, questioning the inequality of Cerberuses).

The popularity of RTA is orders of magnitude lower than 3.1, simply because of what I mentioned above; the popularity of mods is almost always orders of magnitude lower than that of original games. There are very few exceptions. In the Heroes community, there are currently none. Even WoG is much less popular than the original Heroes 3.

Regarding the RTA format, I once kept official statistics on the number of people who played in tournaments over time. It amounted to several hundred (in the Russian-speaking segment), and many play repeatedly over several years. Try to organize a tournament with 20-30 people on at least one mod, and then say that RTA is not popular. You can also Google tournaments for the original 3.1 and compare the number of participants and the frequency of these tournaments (but I won't do that, as it's off-topic).