Quote Originally Posted by Basileus
for my taste i´d say Greek City States, awesome hoplites and greek cav with alot of exp is preety kick ass and it will not cost you alot.
Good point. The relative experience, upgrades and generals' ranking makes and enormous difference to the performance of any unit type. It's pretty hard to judge any unit from just one situation. eg inexperienced Hastati with a 1 star general fight like elderly ladies and break and run on a whim, but veteran Hastati, with armour and weapons upgrades, under a 6 or 7 star general fight like fanatics and will take huge losses before quiting.

With respect to TerranAce007's experience with hoplites - I found that if you stick them on the wall and turn off phalanx, they perform well in hand to hand with their short sword. This could be my imagination but I thought that they performed even better when I got them to attack the guys coming over the wall (as opposed to getting them to just stand there in guard mode).

.........and the Seleucids seem to have pretty much every hardcore unit on their unit list. I played with them and near the end they were invincible.