Riff-raff units too strong?

[Nightmare]

I'm a hardcore strategy game nut. I have all the "total war" games, as well as others. I ran across this mod and downloaded it recently, and I think it's the best by far I've ever played. Good job on developing this.

One complaint. Units of riff-raff caliber seem to be far stronger against elite units than they should be. For instance (this is just one example), I'm currently playing a Carthage campaign. Some of these Numidian cities will be held by riff-raff "joke" units - guys wearing towels and holding wooden spears. Guys with zero armor. I'll build a full stack of the best cavalry I can field, bring in a general, and attack. I'll lose the entire stack against these joke units. I just spent 100,000 on the units themselves, not counting the infrastructure it took. He spent a couple thousand on rag-tag riff-raff, and he slaughters me time and time again, kills the general, etc.

It isn't my technique - I know how to charge cavalry, to pull it out, to repeat. It isn't the difficulty settings - this particular game has battle difficulty set to medium. It isn't that he has some 10 star general and I don't have a general at all. It's that low cost riff-raff seems higher powered than it should be. This actually deters one from teching-up and getting decent units, because they aren't better than the riff-raff you can field (with the exception of greek phalanxes, which when properly deployed seem to annihilate everything else).

Anyone else notice this, or am I the only one?