Quote Originally Posted by cython
1) Why Macedonians start with such a bad economy?
This is intentional, and applies to almost all factions. Most nations seemly could not afford to run around with multiple armies, so the EB team increased the upkeep from all units. This also makes your armies more valuable; as a loss is expensive. Basically, at the start of the game you are faced with a simple choice: either use your units or disband them. Especially get rid of fleets: they are criplingly expensive and in a 1:1 encounter the A.I. always wins (at H and VH anyway).

Makedon was in a bad position at the start of the game. They had barely recovered from the Galatean migration or Pyrrhus of Epirus burned down their capital. Antigonus just regained it the start of the game. As soon as you can get your mines operative you will be able to get a steady cashflow (too much actually, the team is planning to decrease mine income again in the next patch).

2) Missile troops & cavarly don't seem to be effective (at least on my compter... even though I have a clean install + of RTW w patch 1.2 & EB without altering anything else)
The missile part has already been adressed (though I agree missile effectiveness can be somewhat fickle in EB), but the cavalry problems stems mainly from the broken charge value in R:TW 1.2. There is no way to properly balance this: either you get cavalry that ploughs head-on through heavy infantry or you get cavalry that can be stopped by a single skirmisher. This should be fixed by the port to 1.5.