I experienced slow cavalry with the tutorial campaign
The RTR readme does suggest that you get yourself past the tutorial before installing the mod...

RTR saved Rome for me.
Vanilla was just too wrong on so many points.

I love being able to have time to watch the combat :)
Spears & particularly phalanx capable units are actually able to hold off cavalry in frontal attacks!
And yet, a flanking attack rightfully can annihilate the phalanx in short order.

RTR as previously stated is suffering from some bugs/design decisions that only CA can fix hopefully in the coming patch :) & a bunch of others that I expect/hope to be fixed for RTR 4.0, like the unit cards...

I particularly like the sound of the ZoR replacement, which is quite simple & bypasses some of the downsides of ZoR.
Basically it goes something like:
When you take over a city, if they are of a different culture, then you can't make use of their unit building facilities, meaning you have to spend some time 'Romanising' the province by building your own barracks etc. from scratch