Just to clarify, in this context by "later" I mean Second Punic Wars and onwards. The crisis point here is that a number of formerly allied Italian communities defected to Hannibal, and were no longer relied upon to provide troops in their traditional forms after that point. The Samnites and Bruttians in particular.

Which causes a problem for someone like me who makes heavy use of those troops to balance out the socii alae with genuinely non-Roman troops, but who is also interested in historically-accurate composition. There isn't a lot written about the Italian/Latin allies, and it's often assumed they were equipped pretty similarly to the Romans they fought alongside.

But what I don't want to do is just recruit a nearly-all-Roman army, even if the Italians were similar. It offends my sense of variety, and I find an all-Roman army boring. It's bad enough that the trend of standardisation is taken to it's ultimate conclusion in post-Marian troops without having to suffer that earlier as well.

Problem is we don't have "Italic hastati", "Italic principes", "Italic triarii" and so on. I'm not arguing we should have them, they'd be a waste of three or more unit slots just to have slightly different skins but identical stats. What I would like though, are some ideas as to what units I could recruit instead.

I'm tempted to pretend the Bruttian infantry are "Italic hastati" because they're not far off, even if the real Bruttians were disloyal. But there isn't an easy principes-analogue since the Samnite Heavy Infantry vanish with the Polybian reform. Are there any other heavy swordsmen that would work in that slot? Are Neitos too much of a stretch?

I often don't bother with allies in the third line, but are there any spear units that would make an appropriate triarii-analogue?

Thoughts?