Still in my first real campaign as Sparta, I've noticed that thureos/eliptical shielded units are everywhere.
From EB I knew the Greeks had taken up the thureos in a big way during this time period so nice to find Thureos Spears & Thorax Swords around Greece & Successor areas
But I hadn't expected them to be quite so prevalent.
First surprise was my Spartan Periokoi Spears: at first I assumed from the name that they would be a light spear unit much like the Spartan Youths & stayed away but then I tried them out & found them a pretty sweet thureos & linothorax spear unit.
I've been playing with 3 main army types: Hoplite main line with mostly Periokoi Hoplites with Spartan/Royal Spartans holding flanks.
Pike phalanx with varying numbers of pike + Spartan/Royal Spartans &/or Periokoi Spears holding flanks.
Those worked pretty well & I found the Periokoi Spears to do well so I have also been using several armies with main line being entirely Periokoi Spears too & quite successfully at that.
Anyway, in my campaigning around the map there has been a great variety of enemies but with one constant: Thureos/oval shields everywhere.
Greek type Peltasts at this time had oval shields, a bit smaller than the thureos but similar shape.
The Greeks got the thureos from the Gauls so no surprise to see them plentiful in Gallic areas.
Dacians & Thracians have their own types too, some pretty tough.
Spain is well renowned for their oval shielded infantry & is also heavily Gaul influenced so no surprise to find plenty of thureos in Spain. (though I've not yet gone over there)
Carthage is believed to have taken up the thureos while fighting in Spain so no surprise to see a decent number of thureos units in their armies both the lower level Libyan & the tough Thorax Sword type Africans.
Numidia & other African nomad types also have oval shield units, fairly light though.
But wait, there is more! In the North we have Nomadic Spears in the thureos style.
And in the East the Eastern Spears also thureos style & factions like Pontus, Media & Parthia make heavy use of thureos/thorax units.
Several of the Near Eastern/Successor states were said to have used 'Roman style' infantry, though this was probably more likely the thureos types which actually predate 'Roman style' so we have Thorax Swords, Royal Guards etc in these places.
Literally everywhere on the map there are Thureos units in plenty.
I have seen people complain about AI armies full of levies but I'm not seeing that at all.
While there have been some full of levies I found many armies heavily loaded with reasonably tough thureos & very tough thorax type units and I found them pretty tough, to the point I wound up actively avoiding having to fight them.
Particularly difficult has been Parthia & Parthava factions who had a bunch of stacks with both a bunch of tough cavalry & ranged units but also lots of Thorax Swords.
When fighting them I took heavy losses, often failed to eliminate stacks & had to retreat to friendly territory to recover.
I lacked enough concentrated force to contain them when they went off rampaging through neighbouring regions & actually wound up making peace with Parthava in order to buy time to raise more armies & have others finish securing their areas so that I could concentrate several armies & finish them off.
So in summary: Thureos spear units are solid & everywhere, Thorax units are pretty tough & armies loaded with them are very dangerous.
As far as I understand the history, this is good and appropriate
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