But many of my hoplites already have the over-hand grip...do you mean all of them?

AFAIK there were two kinds of hoplites, the Hellenistic and the Macedonian "Alexandrian" hoplites...when I made a small "mod" for RTW (it was mostly a personal mod) I made this so, using shield wall since I ran it through BI.exe.

But what do you mean that I wont be able to see the first cohorts?