Whow,
1st, thanks for the warm welcome and the quick, detailed responses

Since I'm coming from the 'opposite' side of the universe (citybuilding (Caesar3, Pharaoh, et all) & CRPG (BG-series)) I played (snooping)RTW1.2 - Julii as such, meaning always autoresolving the battles just to get the strategic map aspect down

Believe it or not, it is possible to win - took me until 134bc to do so (full campaign) since I suffered quite high losses in each battle (some 300+ total IIRC)
Win or lose this way turned out to be like playing (russian)roulette ( I won some where the odds were 4:1 against me and lost were I had 5:1 favour) so I assumed there must be some 'scripting' involved to develop my empire as intended...
Now, the battle part of the tutorial in RTW is very confusing, I played it min 5, 6 or 7 times trying to keeping track of the events and its implications - to little avail .
Summary, cavalry good against archers; spearmen good against cavalry; archers good against spearmen. Now, where does that leave all the other units that you can build (arcani, hastatii, town watch to name a few) and which of the categoties do they fall into ??? And what about the formations and tactics - oh my...

@LegioXXXUlpiaVictrix,
thanks for the tip of the tutorial in MTW being more 'in depth' - I'll give them a try then...

PS, I came to love assassins - they took out quite a number of 'stars' especially down in the Egypt (near east)area (60 years old, 6 or seven proficiency 'Eyes'?) heck, I sent him in against ? marks and he came back victorious

Again, thanks for the input and all the info to be found on this great site - I think I'll try to 'master' RTW and/or BI first (after coming to grips with the battle tutorials in MTW), so maybe I'll get to contribute a little to the knowledge base since it seems the least resolved and very wide angled with all these possiblities.