Saka troubles

[Tyfus]

So I tried to do the whole nomadic thing with the saka rauka. I started a campaign on vh/m with large units and was totally destroyed. Starting off you have very few units because they are all horse units and that alone makes them very expensive. I think starting cash flow is something like -3500 or something around there.

Anyway despite this I captured two cities with my starting armies thinking that nomadic tech tree would not be advanced enough to overcome that kind of deficit. I took the nomadic town where your main army starts in the south near baktria and then I took the town to the west of my capital. Because of this my troops were very depleted and I was getting towards -10,000 in debt, so I couldn't retrain or build or anything. Chigu the capital was still -2,000 income or something which negated any profit from my other provinces.

Then I disbanded most of my horse units to try and get some positive cash flow, but because we are now running on 1.5 and the A.I. is a little smarter the eleutheroi started attacking my defensless towns and I was completely destroyed.

So with all that said, I obviously did something really wrong. How does anybody get a successful campaign going with these guys? I feel like their starting conditions are a little too crappy to overcome. So suggestions and/or examples would be greatly appreciated.

thanks