Things to Improve

[locked_thread]

But when it comes to full stacks, the quality of individual units becomes important; you can't compensate by bringing more low-class units to the fight once you've hit the cap of 20 units.

- If you build 2-turn elite units you will have half as many stacks. Which makes you unable to flood enemy territory or easily counter enemy flooding.
- Many elite units aren't significantly better than their 1-turn counterparts. Compare Spartans to regular Armored Hoplites.
- I've never played a campaign where elite units turned the tide. Usually I regret building them, as they cost a fortune and delay my attack, giving my enemies breathing room.

Your army is able to defeat the garrison 1 on 1, but would be hard pressed to fight the combined might of the field army and the garrison.

If you build cavalry instead of war machines, often you CAN defeat both the garrison and the field army. And you can lay seige sooner, because your army moves much faster without dragging war machines. A big exception of course - surprise attacks launched from boats onto coastal cities. Still, many campaigns are decided before I have the infrastructure to build war machines.

Place 8 ships around the enemy fleet so that it is completely surrounded. Then attack.

I used to do this but it's tedious and requires huge fleets.

That's why you should always play with the battle timer disabled.

Except for cases where you'd wait forever. Like seiges where the defenders sally and you kill them to a man, but the game doesn't notice. Or you have 500 pikemen and the Parthians attack you with a single family member who refuses to approach your lines and you have no way to run him down. (Both of these happened to me last night.)

If you use slow armies (that is, NOT all-cavalry armies) then loading units into ships lets you move them long distances much faster than marching...

Uh, yes, but it's still incredibly slow to move a fleet from Carthage to Egypt, for example.