Hello yes! I think I"ll make a thread to post custom units in just in case anyone wants to use mine. Or, if anyone is feeling particularly sainted, if they want to post their own creations here for my use. It's all good!
(Per ghoul riding a spider)
Supply Cost: 18 gp weekly
Wages: 315 gp monthly
(per unit of 60)
Supply: 1,080 gp weekly
Wages: 18,900 gp monthly
Paralysis and poison actually use the exact same rule: On a failed save, lose your UHD in UHP. This makes the spider cavalry a terrific anti-big-dude unit. Boar riders have 6 UHD, so if spider riders land all six hits and the boars fail both saves, they could take 18 damage in one go!
That said, ghoul cavalry is not at all cost effective, but if you just sort of HAVE a ton of ghouls and giant black widows sitting around, why not?
Without any assumed confidence it was done fully correctly:
Owlrocs, with two elves with bows riding on the back. There's no mechanical difference between owlrocs and rocs for purposes of D@W. I added barding, however. Because barred owls.
Barghest are essentially gobliny werewolfs, higher HD. BR was calculated at the highest movement rate. They are pretty bad-ass, but if they fail a save versus natural fire, they are bamphed out of existence:
99% of monsters are far, faaar better than 1HD humans and demi-humans. Better-enough to offset the cost? Looks like we're going to need to play a lot more D@W to find out...
I think this makes sense from the ACKs paradigm of magical/mythical things existing but being rare. It shouldn't make economical sense for a mundane polity to field unusual troops, or you'd have a world so different from history that it would be impossible to have a reasonable frame of reference. Instead, the costs should be exorbitant so most would skip it, but something with story reasons ("this colony of drow have raised giant spiders for millenia") has a reason to have the troops standing, without regard for how much it cost.
World War I was the last era when troops still fought in massed formations while also introducing aircraft, tanks, and battleships, so this seemed like a useful benchmark.
The French Army had 8 million soldiers during WW I, with 4000 tanks. The US Army had 4,355,000 soldiers and 4,436 aircraft. The British army had 8.9 million soldiers and 18 dreadnaughts, 10 battle cruisers, 35 cruisers, and 200 destroyers. So those were the sort of ratios I was looking for fantasy warfare to mimic.
For flying creatures, I looked at the relative cost of cavalry versus fighter aircraft in the WWI era. For powerful monsters, I looked at the prices of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses compared to the cost of of fighter planes to get an estimate of what the price difference between a dragon and a pegasus might be. I also looked at prices of WWI dreadnaughts and early tanks.
In the context of the Auran Empire, assuming an army of about 250,000, it would only have about 125 "tanks", 240 "fighters", and 2 "battleships/battlecruisers" across the entire army. So we're looking at, say, 6 20-creature units of huge monsters (maybe bronze golems or something), 4 60-creature units of air cavalry (grififn riders or something), and 2 "battleships", maybe giant rocs with spellcasters on them. So, they exist, but the typical battle is not going to see them making an appearance.
If you want to have a more fantastical playing field it's easy enough to fiddle with these dials.
Or for special occasions and the morale effect. Sure, a unit of barghests costs the same as 25,000 normal men. But what's more intimidating? As a rebel, I would think twice before risking that they'll send the Emperor's Fury, a squad of sixty unkillable giants that've fought thousands and lived. Or 40k's SPESS MEHREINS.