So another chariot story. So I'm rolling through puke gr... I mean Averni (heh) like a hot knife through butter, with 3 separate stacks taking cities at once. At any rate, my swordsmen stack, together with my faction leader, attacks one of his cities. I get inside and kick his butt all the way back to his little city square area. He has almost nothing left by this point - literally a unit of naked gallic swordsmen (forget their actual name, but you know what I'm talking about). I purposefully and neatly line up all my units in rows completely surrounding him. About 7 or 8 units of fully-topped up belgae swordsmen in the front, the same number of southern gallics on the side, and a bunch of stuff at his rear, along with my faction leader who has 30 - count them 30 - men in his unit (normal unit sizes). I give the order for everything to charge in and attack all at once, and everything does. I'm thinking "this is gonna be a slaughter, haha!" and as soon as my chariots his naked guys - from behind no less - with everything else colliding from the front and sides at the same time, I get the mini-cinematic of my faction leader going down, then get the message that he's killed. There's still 30 men in his unit of chariots, but he's dead. I just laughed and shook my head.

I don't care what anyone says, they are one of the worst-designed units in the game. If the game was full of esoteric units that were hard-countered in many situations but did good when severely micromanaged just right, it would be par for the course. But the game isn't full of units like that - it seems this is the only one, or one of the only ones.