Sure enough, in another battle the AI did indeed advance the melee line once it's ranged units were at about half strength. AI had four ranged and three melee. It held it's line until the ranged units began losing their effectiveness. Then it advanced the melee units to delay my own melee attack. Thereby buying the ranged units another round or two. I look forward to more AI improvements!

I've started making units for each and every weapon/armor upgrade I make. While trying to make the factions unique. It's grown a little tedious as I'd skip some of these myself. I'd like to be able to design units outside of a game. To do up the lot of them all at once. 

I hope in the future, we will have a method to swap units like we were able to do with maps for E:WOM using Impulse.

Truly, the design team needs to get on this

(while its kind of nice that we get to make our own units for Factions ... for the most part they should ALREADY be competent )

Yeah, I just think they need to add a lot more unit abilities.  That's where it's at.  That would also go along way to creating faction differentiation.  Each faction should have their own unit abilities and every tech should open up one new ability. 

There are infinite possibilities here, but they're probably better suited for another thread.