In terms of what I’d find realistic, here are my thoughts.
The problem with making cruisers more attractive by giving them cruiser-specific abilities is that, in many cases, battleships would logically have to be given the same abilities too…in which case you end up right back where you started, with battleships being a better purchase than cruisers. WWII cruisers and battleships were both surface-combat warships whose primary weapons were heavy guns (though not of the same caliber) and which were both armoured (though not to the same degree).
The concept of giving cruisers AAA ability has some potential, since cruisers typically did have some appreciable AAA firepower, but the problem is that battleships had a lot of AAA firepower too. So giving AAA abilities to cruisers but not to battleships makes little sense.
As for the concept of cruisers carrying troops, the problem is that neither cruisers nor battleships were used in that capacity very much (if at all). The Japanese did use destroyers as improvised fast troop carriers during the Guadalcanal campaign, but that was a peculiar situation and the number of troops transported this way was limited. At any rate, those were destroyers, not cruisers or battleships. And a fundamental problem with the concept of using battleships or cruisers as troops transports is that both ship types draw a lot more water (in terms of keel depth) than a destroyer, so it’s essentially impossible for them to get close enough to shore to unload troops unless they’re using a proper port (with dredged channels and adequate docks or piers), something which isn’t typically available when an amphibious landing is being made on a hostile beach. Even destroyers can’t really do the job properly in many cases, because they too have keels; the land on a beach properly, you need large numbers of flat-bottomed assault craft…something which isn’t carried by battleships or cruisers or destroyers.
As for dropping the cost of a cruiser from 12 to 10, the problem here is that it makes cruisers almost as cheap as destroyers (which cost eight), which is wildly unrealistic for a heavy cruiser and debatable for a typical light cruiser. There were, I believe, some unusually light cruisers built by a couple of nations (Italy being one) as “destroyer leaders”, but I don’t think they were very capable vessels.
I think that the modification which makes the most sense from a realism perspective would be to boost cruiser movement from 2 to 3, thus making the cruiser the only sea unit with a movement figure higher than 2. The word “cruiser” reflects the fact that cruisers were typically seen as surface-combat ships having the ability to carry out “cruises”, meaning extended operations at sea (autonomously, if need be). Cruisers had bigger fuel tanks than destroyers (because the ships themselves were bigger), and they weren’t as heavy as battleships (because they were smaller and less heavily armoured), so they were long-ranged and, I would guess, they were probably the most fuel-efficient vessels overall out of the three types. They could reach high speeds when you operated them at full steam, though of course this burned up fuel much faster than at cruising speed. So all in all, I’d say a movement boost is the least problematic option in terms of accuracy. Whether that’s enough to make it a popular purchase is another story, but at least it’s an improvement over what we get under the OOB rules.
