Cant defeat the Phalanx

Having read all the way down this, one suggestion I did not see until the very end was ARMOR!

If you don't have a blacksmith, build one, and retrain everybody in the city. When you can build an Armorer, do the same thing, retrain everybody. In time, you will be able to build a foundry. Build it, retrain again, and you will notice the orange shield on the unit card has turned silver. If I have only one foundry, and half a dozen cities nearby, I actually rotate men in and out to upgrade their armor. In some cities, the foundry will put out an armor symbol of a gold shield which from what I have seen, is the ultimate upgrade.

If you took units with no armor at all against a phalanx with armor, you probably lost. If they had foundry armor, you definitely lost.

If you only have one city with an armorer, then you need to rotate entire armies into and out of it to get armor until you have an armorer built in the other cities. Same with a foundry. Do this by rotating in an infantry for every infantry you rotate out, same for cavalry and archers.

Now to prevent you making a mistake I used to make. Say that for some reason, you have one Urban Cohort with armorer quality armor (orange or copper in color), and another with foundry armor. In a battle, you have casualties in both. Afterward, you have say, 63 of one, and 72 of the other. Before I knew better, I used to replace casualties by "dragging and dropping" from the copper unit card into the silver one. Don't do that. Yes, for the moment, it will look like about 8 of your copper armor guys dropped their copper armor, and put on silver, and now you only have to retrain the copper ones to full strength. Problem is, click back on them a few minutes later, and the whole group has dropped to copper armor. In short, don't drag and drop different armor types to replace casualties.

On the good side, if you have 80 men such as Legionary Cohorts in silver armor, and take casualties on the way to taking another city, you can retrain them all back to full strength if the other city has legionary cohort capability, and they all keep whatever armor they had.

One way that also has worked for me to take on a phalanx with a phalanx but is very difficult:

Take all of your phalanxes out of phalanx mode, and double time them to the end of the enemy's right, (your left). Use two of your phanlanxes to engage the enemy's end unit. The others must be double timed to the enemy's right flank, and immediately charge the flank, going into phalanx mode just before contact. I used this method to destroy 10 phalanxes with five, but it is very important to change from phalanx to standard formation as you work down the line.

The drawback is that once the enemy has armor, and you still don't because your city doesn't have an armorer yet, he is going to carve you up. Do not take unarmored hoplites against a phalanx with armor.

Strength and Honor

Celt Centurion