but they are still only human. and what you have is not a roman army, its something completely off the mark.
Well in your opinion. I think i hit the spirit rather well. Strong blocks of infantry, boni to formation changes, little cavallery, no monsters etc.
the warhammer world is more set in darkages anyway rather than ancient roman and dark age armies would trounce the romans (heavy cavalry, etc etc).
Thats why i tried to gave them some advantages.
For starters what changes the gladius above a normal hand weapon? When chaos warriors hell forged metal or dwarven steel or the high elves forged swords gives literally no bonus I don't see why a large knife should. Same for shields. Both High and Dark Elves not to mention chaos themselves use tower shields with none of these bonuses.
Realism? Are you kidding me?
High elves: Because my archer had some bad ass training with his knife, he strikes first against your heavy lance wielding cavalery.
Dark Elves: We hate you all, because of that we hit you more often. Only High elves we hate even more.
If you want a fluffy explanation than put it down to training. My aim was to give the Infantry at least a fighting chance against some of the baddies out there (which they probably still dont have) while adding some character to the army. If i remove all those special rules i have a crappy empire army.
And a mindboggling 10 points for a unit thats basically armed with 4+ armour save and a weapon that can reduce opponent's shields to scrap in the Hastaati. Instead keep it simple and have them have the stats you want rather than "boosts from equipment".
They have the stats i want. They are humans after all. And how often do you think that they will be able to destroy an opponents shields? Firstly they have to find such a unit. Then that unit has to mess up a strenght test. Even if it does and gets into combat with the Hastati or other units in question it will still be facing only a low number of S3 attacks. I see the 10 points justified. After all we are talking here about an army without heavy hitters outside characters.
And pila should just be throwing spears.
Which would be boring.
How about "drill" - Hastaati can throw spears on the charge or being charged always so gain a round of shooting before charges (both theirs and their opponents, entire unit throws at -1 BS)
Now we do start talking. The variant you suggest would make them more powerfull though. In my case only the first 2 ranks, so around 10 models could throw, and only when getting charged or when within range in the shooting phase. In your case the whole probably 25 men can throw even if they charge. Sure at the end of the day you probably only kill 3 models if that. In my variant they probably kill one if that and have a small to average chance to remove the units shields, if they have any.