Sauromatae is my new favorite faction.

[Unintended BM]

Crazy powerful bodyguards, great starting position and great units. Saka and Pahlava have better units overall probably, but I don't care. I'm gonna conquer all of Europe and get a giant Ukrainian empire, it'll be great!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I just thought I'd share the greatness of the Sarmatians that I am experiencing at the moment.

[anubis88]

It's great when you start playing a faction in EB, and don't expect much, but then it becames your favourite of all? Happened to me as well :)

[Madoushi]

I was sad when my game doing well as the Sauromatae started constantly CTDing.
I started one new game where I went for Gava-Yugra first, but by the time I captured that and then Tanais, I was 35K inb debt.

So now I'm on my fifth Sauro game, and hopefully gonna do things right for once.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

I blitz very quickly with the Sauromatae in the beginning, taking Tanais within 2 turns and Gava-Yugra within 4 turns. You can only do that by accepting the fact that your attacking forces are going to be outnumbered by the defenders. However, this can help if you besiege the towns instead of assaulting them, because if your attacking force is small enough, the defenders will bravely sally out and attack you instead of sitting on the town square. In the open fields around the town, fighting on the defensive, your horse archers have the advantage. Horse archers are not so good in assaults.

[Madoushi]

I find it's better to take Gerogis after Tanais, as it's closer and means I don't have to split up my army.
Also, I never fight fair. In any battle, I have my horse archers skirmish and fire arrows, and when they run out, I run away to conserve casualties.

In my most succesful game, I never took Gava-Yugra or any of the northern provinces, I just kept pushing west and attacking the least defended settlements I could find.

It worked great, but one day I went to load the file and it CTD'd, and ever since then I've been foolishly trying different things.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

I find it's better to take Gerogis after Tanais, as it's closer and means I don't have to split up my army.

I took Gava-Yugra with just the small army that starts very near to it, plus the horse-archer that's in your town nearby. That little army was enough on its own, I didn't need reinforcements from the west - so I managed to take Gava-Yugra and Gelonus simultaneously, rather than one after the other.

[Unintended BM]

I suck at horse archer against horse archer combat, so I waited a while and grouped up all of my armies at the start and took all the nearby towns. I got to about -30000 mnai, but obviously in the picture, I made that up relatively fast. Then I noticed a Getai army wandering on my land, so I beat the crap out of them. Very fun game.