The patch is not intended to be a “I want to fix one bug so I will download the patch” situation; it’s a cumulative effect of “I want to fix 30,000 bugs” kind of deal. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up and lets you patch/unpatch in seconds so there is very little effort or overhead required to use it.

You’re of course welcome to your opinion re: balance, but I do naturally think that position is completely absurd and not supported by game design principles (or the original developers, or the original balance testers, or the pre-EE community). I can agree with you that there may be specific matchups where the game isn’t clearly better/worse with vs without the balance bug, but in the aggregate the balance is much worse with the bugs present. Try beating Aircraft Carriers with the damage bugs: it takes more than TWENTY light ships to beat ONE carrier’s planes: completely stupid given that they’re the “counter”. You’re basically saying that the combined efforts of the original developers, the original balance testers, and the pre-EE community made the game worse than if none of them tried to improve game balance.

Mamalukes work fairly well in isolation, but are not a very effective counter for army-vs-army combat. They deal okay damage but take a fair bit in return. The matchup is much worse than just using LC, but of course you do gain the benefit of range making them safer and more reliable. The biggest issue is that Mamalukes’ matchup against Arquebusiers/Musketeers is awful (much worse than Mamalukes -> ranged cav), meaning the Mongols player can just do a split on Arquebusiers/Musketeers and Horde/Golden Horde and any composition you choose that includes Mamalukes will lose to it in an otherwise even fight (unless playing on CBP; I don’t know what happens there). The whole thing also relies on counterpicking the enemy’s nation in the lobby, which is simply not how games are played 99% of the time so it’s not an especially practical counter to bring up (even if it was effective) since it won’t be available in most games.

Mumlukes, which can make short work of all Mongol UU.