How to most effectively use some units?

[Watchman]

I tend to treat a line of phalanxes as something like a wall of spear-point. If I'm attacking I tend to simply march them reasonable close to the enemy in normal formation, lower the pikes, and snail-pace the remaining distance. Seems to work well enough, at least when I keep a few infantry units behind the line to plug the gaps, pursuit, and take care of any flanks created when a phalanx routs its foe and I turn it to the side to help its neighbor mince up the unit it is fighting against.

And cavalry on the flanks. Always have cavalry hanging around the ends of the pike line. Actually, even if you think you won't be needing mobility, take cavalry along *anyway*. If nothing else they chase routers a lot better.

In cities I tend to advance the phalanxes by simply keeping the pikes lowered and click-and-dragging them to a suitable spot. Normally works well enough on straight streets, but corners can be problematic. Still, even if the front ranks find themselves fighting the foes with their weeny lil' daggers that's not such a big deal once their mates in the back ranks lower their pikes, or the next phalanx marches in with lowered pikes. Several phalanxes piled atop one another seems to be very very nasty.

As for the scythed chariots, I mostly use them for bandit-hunting or as low-maintenance and easily-retrained stand-ins for proper heavy cavalry, naturally with every sodding armour and weapon improvement I can get (rule of thumb: if you have access to a smith-type temple line, have at least a few training centers furnished with those). I tend to treat them as cheap and cheerful terror units that go in just before the main force impacts to mess up the other guys' formation. They keep cavalry off the flanks of your pikemen just fine, too.

As a side note, I've always been a bit puzzled by the chariot stats in the game. They have separate statistics for the chariot and the crew (e.g. SC drivers are basically Cataphracts with the appropriately macho armour rating of 18, but the defense stats of their chariots total about 1 which is also the number you see in the in-game info scrolls). I've always assumed the chariot is the one which gets hurt in melee, while the crew is the one who gets hit by missiles (SCs seems to be fairly arrow-proof). The chariots' main defense in melee seems to be the way they project a sort of "kill field" around themselves, at least as long as they move, inside which everything gets bonked by the attack ratings of the chariot itself and usually knocked down. Beats me how any melee attacks the crew may have get factored in, or just how exactly the game computes if an when a chariot sustains a hit. It always seems pretty random to me.

And I never could figure out if the way the Pontic Chariot crews had a melee defense skill (others don't) actually affected anything.

[Nelson]

Watchman, I think we went to the same ludus. I employ pikes in the very same way. Line 'em up and march 'em forward while delaying the pike drop until the last moment. A few peltasts immediately behind them are nice too.

As for the scythed chariots, I mostly use them for bandit-hunting or as low-maintenance and easily-retrained stand-ins for proper heavy cavalry, naturally with every sodding armour and weapon improvement I can get (rule of thumb: if you have access to a smith-type temple line, have at least a few training centers furnished with those). I tend to treat them as cheap and cheerful terror units that go in just before the main force impacts to mess up the other guys' formation. They keep cavalry off the flanks of your pikemen just fine, too.

I use chariots like this too. They even enjoy the advantage of having only a small impact upon population growth.

[Kraxis]

The SC are definately bad as lone gunmen. I had a single unit of rebel Estern Infantry outside Hatra. THe only unit capable of reaching them was a unit of SC. So off they went.
The battle was a horrible disaster.
I marched them up fairly close, rested a time then charged in. At first it seemed to go good, but then the chariots took losses and suddenly the EI killed the general. RATS! Lost 19 out of 28 and killed only 33.