But better still to give them an extra attack or two... then you can raise their cost 200-300 minai
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Regarding the OP: recall, though, that the wealthier Principes-class soldiers would also have been better able to afford having someone "sub" for them while they were away fighting... not sure how exactly they handled it, but for the sake of comparision when a Viking Age Scandinavian peasant went aborad (to raid or trade, made no difference) he left his wife and the most trusted senior household slave run the farm in his absence. Worked well enough. Similarly Medieval knights and the like left their estates to a senesalch and female family members when they left for faraway battlefields (and might end up spending years as a hostage waiting for friends and relatives scrape together ransom money...).
*shrug*
But I'm no expert on the details of Republican Roman socioeconomic arrangements.
Anyway, the stat and price similarity between particularly the Camillian Hastati and Principes is a bit of "what can you do?" thing, because that's the result you get with the given unit parameters when employing the formulas and values used to compute EB unit stats and prices. I should know, I've done those calculations often enough...
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Still easy to kill though... i haven't played since Empire came out but i remember playing as the Epirotes, building a phalanx army with light support troops, landing it in Taras and marching all the way up the Italian peninsula with it in a war that lasted over 10 years. The Romans simply threw themselves on the tips of my phalanx.
It was fun to see it develop. At firs i was fighting armies of heavy infantry, and as the years went on and i had their ports blockaded Rorarii began playing a bigger and bigger role in their armies. By the time i reached Rome after 4 or so years fighting, i besieged the empty city with around a third of my army while the rest camped north and held off any relief attempts. I besieged the city for about 2 years, asking for protectorate status every turn because i didn't want to eliminate Rome, just defeat them, but eventually i just took the city.
After that, Rome controlled Arretium, Ariminum and the 4 provinces north. It was all over for them by that point. They still sent armies my way, but they consisted of Rorari and Lugoae, which fare very, very very poorly in frontal assaults against levy phalanxes and phalangitai with 2 and 3 units of silver experience.
I did eventually reduce the Romans to Patavium and they finally accepted a ceasefire. I left them alone for 2 years or so and then decided to put them out of their misery.
I couldn't even count how many were killed in the campaign. They literally sent 2 or 3 armies at me every single turn for the entirety of the campaign, the dead must have been well over 30,000, considering i play on huge and each army was a full stack of support units but with no main units for them to support.
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