Remember you can only play the Macedonians in Alexander, so you won't fight phalanxes. You do get the other downside of RTW phalanxes, though: in the hands of a human they can steamroller nearly all non-phalanx infantry.
You'll be pleastently surprised by Alexandros then. In the course of doing the Greek cities for it, i did some custom battles v Macedonians. The Greek Cities no longer use the vanilla phalanx formation, and instead only use signifierones overhand hoplite animation. The greek units gave as good as they got against the macedonian phalanxes, so things will no longer be a push over once my mod comes out.