No because you wrote:
Meaning if lets say (just a theoretical thought experiment) you swapped the attack bonus of your own LR and LM units: Suddenly Dust/Scrolls would be the easiest tourneys and Steel would be the most difficult
You can swap as much attack bonus as you like, it wouln't matter a thing. yes LM sucks because it has nog range, nor bulk to survive the onslought, not because of it's attack bonus, even heavy melee sucks, I try to avoid treants for a reason, tho they have bulk they to have no range.
Ah now I see what you are going for
I guess I wasn´t very clear on the whole swapping thing, I just threw it in as an afterthought. I agree with what you say, LM suck at everything (you forgot to mention initiative, which makes them get whackedd first by the units they are supposedly good against), and swapping attack boni would certainly not make them any better. What I wanted to say with that is that if they had different attack boni it would be different tourneys that are "meant for them" and whatever tourney is "meant for LM troops will be the most difficult tourney to play, because they always suck.
And I would add that the reason dogs are the best out of that sorry lot is that they at least don´t suck at range, only all the others
And yes also trees (or HM) are no good for much, which is why crystal and silk are not the easiest of all tourneys either. Their hitpoints are good and boosting them further works better with HM than any other units so the tourneys are still alright to play, although rather boring...
But if I do manual fights I never (well maybe 1% of the time) use any melee troops. Combinations of the 3 ranged types (mostly LR and Mage) are what i use, but to get back to the initial post: Not because ranged (well a partly because they are), but mostly because of their initiative, so I get to decide what happens on the field.
I am a snob who refuses to use troops in the spire, every unit that does in the spire could have gotten more KP or other goodies in the tournaments.
The second problem is that I use every booster for 2 tournaments, this means that I can only employ such strategy every other week, and have to spend some of my time boosters on advancing trought the spire in time, I rather use those on building more units.
Not for me, more troops won´t get me more points simply because I don´t have enough provinces I only have 450 or so provinces, I can do all my provinces 6 times every week (unless I get annoyed with the clicking), so I am happy to spend them in the spire on occasion, sometimes for the fun of it without any boosters or firebirds
While I have boosters active I can finish about half my fights with 0 or near 0 losses anyway. So it doesn´t cost me troops at all. My reason for catering most of the spire atm is that I don´t play the newest chapter, which means I have a goods production running with nothing to do for them. Which is not a big deal for standard goods, but the sentient stuff just decays, so I figure I better use the stuff for something productive. Makes for happy game play if you have both enough troops and goods to do the entire spire (would be fun if I could play it twice a week) So I just pick and choose according to fancy. Since the spire does have an end it means there is no ambition beyond finishing, it´s just there to have fun with
But yes I love the 2 tourneys per 5day building, haven´t had a boost like that to my tourneys in a while lol. I just have to make sure to in the end stop the cooldown at 2% rather than 0 at least until they fix the bug on the App that hates 0 cooldown.