Picking up on Fridges point about the strategic impact of Huge units I can confirm that these are really beginning to bite in my game now.

During my vanilla campaign as the Romans I got into a routine habit of putting conquered cities to the sword. It made sense, after all they had resisted Roman rule and the reduction of population gave me time to settle any cultural issues without having riots in the streets every few minutes.

I am being forced to rethink this policy in my new campaign as with huge units de-population has become a real issue. One unit of peasants for example can strip a city of 240 men and at least one of my cities now has no men left capable of military service and a population of only 562 old men, women and children.

Hence you will notice that most of my armies are formed from arab and persian mercenaries. This seems to be limiting the AI too and so far I have failed to notice anyone fielding the huge army stacks, or the masses of small armies I witnessed in the first campaign. That doesn't mean that the AI doesn't do daft things like sending a general unit out alone but its not so noticeable.

Strategy seems to have changed also as most of my armies are now City based garrissons that fulfill a duel role as keepers of order and defence force. And most battles are brief sallies from the city to drive off an encrouching enemy rather than long campaign marches. The sinple reason in my case is that I don't have the troops for such things.

This means spies, assassins and diplomats have a bigger role in this campaign too. Committing an army is a serious business and so I need to know its really necessary. Assassinating an enemy general can remove his bodyguard without the need to dispatch an army and so its well worth the risk of an assassin to try it and keep the army in hand for use elsewhere.

I have yet to see a full army stack in my game though the garrison of Sidon is almost there, in the meantime the availability of mercenaries in the border provinces is a serious influence upon my offensive capability, especailly as i have to pay them off regularly to save money between forays.