Well, new ways to play are excellent, and you are one of them. They also tend to slow down your game years, hence more movement by the AI. However, there is always one damn horrible problem to deal with when it comes to very long games (in turns, not necessarily real time) is that Egypt will conquer everything and get the fun out of the game. You should tone them down A LOT if you want a fun game with all those mighty unit rosters available to the Seleucids, Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Or else you'll get bored killing the Ptolemaic units (for RTR) all the time. And if vanilla? It's MUCH worse...