For my opening strategies, if all my provinces are adjacent to one another, and my land is not defensible from initial projection, I 'retreat' into far more defensible locations to secure a base before moving out to reoccupy my starter lands. Like in Germania, I simply concentrated all my troops, swarmed south into Italy and conquered the whole peninsula, surrendering the Germanic lands to the Britons (not without a fight, though ;-D ). That left me with only 4 passes to defend by land, and highly improbable and easily-dealt-with amphibious invasions of one unit or less. Likewise I tried an Armenian short campaign the other day and I simply poured all my troops into Asia Minor before expanding east again to reconquer Artaxarta from the Parthians. My playing style is highly mobile, so I depend very little on forts or garrison defences, preferring to let my grand armies take up the burden or relieving sieges etc on the border marches. Also, to me, many cities (almost all) are dispensable, except perhaps, (from a Greek context) Sparta, Carthage and Rome.

In short, I keep moving. The only time my army sits still is to pacify a city until I cobble together a temple to increase PO.

Franc, why is happyness a warm gun? ;-) For me happyness is an Royal Spartan First Urban Cataphract Cohort. :-D