How I lost an empire

[Intranetusa]

You lost as Baktria? At VH/M? That sounds very fun actually =D

Anyways, my strategy for fighting a large number of opponents/silver death:
Take control of key choke points and use the terrain to your advantage. I'm usually able destroy armies at least 3x my size just my commanding the high ground in a hilly/mountainous battle. When fighting horse archer armies, force them into siege battles or recruit horse archers/archers of your own.

If you have a few troops and are cornered by a large enemy, start at the very corner of the map (yes I know it's an exploit)...this way the enemies can't surround and flank you. When you're going to lose the battle no matter what and can't retreat effectively, do as much damage as possible to the enemy. (kill as many of them as possible)

As for conquering territories, I usually blitz and never let the enemy have a moments rest...I conquer one province, occupy/expel/enslave (depending on if I need the money), then move out immediately on the next turn. When I'm blitzing, I usually don't bother waiting to train my faction troops in my main cities, I just recruit a ton of mercs...the money you get from steam rolling cities every other turn usually more than makes up for merc recruitment/upkeep.

Also, to conserve money, I only use levies/slingers/archers/etc to garrison my inner cities, and mostly levies + a few regular troops to garrison the cities in hotly contested battle zones.

And one of things I found useful is to not make your cities multitask - make them do specific things. Generally, I build farms/drainage systems first so they all expand in population (more tax money). Then I make most of my cities pure economic cities (focus on building economy and population only) and a few other cities (ones of the fringes) as military cities (focus on building barracks and increase population).