I, personally, think Katauri could take another bit of inspiration from Nival's HoMM V and make the second/upgraded unit look similar, but different. I'm sure that very few unit upgrades were straight recolours, and once you added the expansions you had two or three different models per unit (Succubi, for example, came in 3 variations), even if the major difference was the removal/addition of visual effects.
I see your point about high profile games, but on the other hand if you look at, as you said, UbiSoft, publishers are looking at "outside" talent. HoMM V was Nival, MM:H VI is by Black Hole (Budapest). There's a lot of talent in Eastern Europe and Russia with studios like Katauri and CDProjekt RED and hopefully over the years we'll see a bigger uptake of them.
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