Warfare tech level as such doesn't matter. What matters is the choices you make when the technology levels up. You need to choose better equipment and when making the choice you can see which items should become available.

If you have chosen the equipment techs, then there might be a bug involved. Are you trying to custom design units or choosing the automatically generated units? The auto-generation doesn't always offer new unit types when you get a new tech level.

yeah it's pretty weird I keep getting auto created units that have staffs and travelors boots :/

I also can't collect shards, and if I click on any item in battle game freezes.  Cool beans.

I also notice that when I train multiple units instead of one, they will randomly dwindle back to just 1 guy even if they never are in battle.