About AI unit recruitment\upkeep

[cannon_fodder]

Then bribe several of those stacks and make them fight for you.

Haha, I forgot that you could do that. I could probably bribe a good portion of his force.

[BelgradeWar]

Bribing made unpatched vanilla RTW soooo easy....won the civil war with Senate and Scipii without breaking a sweat...they where losing armies and cities before they could scream "Corruption!"

[orangat]

At higher campaign difficulties, its hard to make a dent in the AI's finances, maybe even pointless since I keep hearing about 20 full stacks coming out of the blue at VH.

I prefer not to bribe at all and do not take advantage of the many hacky tricks and play at lower difficulty settings where hurting the AIs economy works.

[Upxl]

At higher campaign difficulties, its hard to make a dent in the AI's finances, maybe even pointless since I keep hearing about 20 full stacks coming out of the blue at VH..

Yep the AI cheats.
Last campaign with the Juli's (vh/h), I had the Brits crushed to two small towns.
Sieging one and sabotaging the other with my assasins.

They had 1 governor and 2 warbands stationed there.
every turn I destroyed everything from trade to military buildings.
Then a couple of turns later they had gained 2 chariot units!

[cannon_fodder]

I think the same might have happened on my campaign, and it's on e/e.
All of the Brutii's cities were under siege, except for 2. I had my assassins destroy the barracks in both, yet they still somehow managed to recruit 2 legionary cohorts.

If anyone's interested, I have since destroyed the Brutii army (on the end of one turn, he sent 3 full stacks to attack my army, all were destroyed). I bribed the remenents of his forces and am now taking his cities. At present, I have about half, and all the others are under siege.