Camel Warriors was the best all-round retinue in patch 2.4. However, when Conclave DLC came out Camel Cavalry stats were significantly nerfed. More precisely, all their defensive values were cut in half.
Currently Camel Cavalry is roughly on par with Light Cavalry, with the former performing better in melee phase and the latter performing better in skirmish and pursuit phase. That said, both units use the same combat tactics and neither triggers an early transition from skirmish to melee phase. As a result Light Cavalry generally performs a bit better because the combat tactics tend to keep it in it's preferred combat phase longer.
Note also that for the purpose of selecting combat tactics Camel Cavalry counts as Light Cavalry. This is because every special troop type in the game is considered to be a variation of a base unit type and will be detected as such by the game. As a result both Camel Cavalry and Horse Archers also count as Light Cavalry and War Elephants count as Heavy Cavalry. To give an example, an army that was composed from 150 Camel Cavalry and 100 Horse Archers would get detected as having 60% Camel Cavalry, 40% Horse Archers, and 100% Light Cavalry.
Among other things this means that any army that consists purely out Camel Cavalry and Light Cavalry in any ratio will only ever trigger the Disorganized Harass tactic (or Generic Skirmish). This also causes a serious bug with the Byzantine Cataphract retinue, which consists out of 40% Horse Archers and 60% Heavy Cavalry. The game detects it as having 40% Light Cavalry and less than 50% Horse Archers so it can trigger Harass tactic, which gives no bonus to Heavy Cavalry and even gives a huge -150% attack penalty to the Horse Archers. This is a major reason why Cataphracts performed by far the worst in my big retinue test.
Speaking of which, you can find that thread here:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-in-2-5-2-practical-tests-and-results.941226/
Do take the test with a grain of salt though. In hindsight I came to the conclusion that I should've used a bigger "levy" if I wanted the test to be more realistic, so the results of skirmish units are probably somewhat inflated. Another major thing to note is that I measured cost-efficiency of retinues, essentially assuming that you're limited more by retinue cap and gold than by supply limit.
If you are limited by gold and/or retinue cap the best retinue is Scottish Schiltron. If on the other hand you have reached mega blob size and you are limited more by the supply limit of the provinces in which you are fighting than by cost the French/Occitan/Breton/Norman/German Knight retinue is likely the best. Knight is also good because AI only judges army strength by numbers, so it will constantly underestimate the strength of a retinue largely composed from expensive units such as Heavy Cavalry.
No, it's fine. The game displays the base stats multiplied by all the bonuses from technology and buildings. And the attack is also multiplied by ATTACK_TO_DAMAGE_MULT, which is 0.01 by default.
