I'm enjoying the Lusotannan atm, a savage hard bitten faction with great endurance for skirmishing, ambushing warfare (and everyone has a javelin).

My strategy is to call up my peeps (ie recruit a diverse stack), absorb a neighbouring tribe, go home and party, (ie disband the stack) then repeat until I have all of Hispania. At some point my guys have to "evolve" to a regular army (when I can recruit medium spears and keep them from one war to the next) but until then the standing army is FM's and 1 basic skirmisher per city. In particular I disband non-elite slings between shows because I want them to be a useful minor arm, not a machine-gun squad.

I aim to trade with my neighbours and stay allied or neutral, and if they attack me then i kick them off the peninsula. My preferred kind of battle starts with me crouched behind a bush and my enemy strung out in a great long line whistling and gazing at the clouds. In a stand up fight i tend not to stand up, I run backwards towards lines of hidden skirmishers so every dart gets thrown and then I tend to bug out. Once I have medium spears/elite assaulters/super heavies then i'll stand and fight more.

In the future I will take Ireland, and my end game will be an all-elite raid on North Africa, featuring Balearic sligs, assault inf and every available FM.