I've found it rather annoying when I'm playing that my bodyguard units are always smaller than the enemy's. Way smaller. I'm playing baktria, and I'm having to deal with family -members- that have more somatophylakes than my faction -leader-. A Seleukid family member can have as many as 80 riders, and the pahlav even more, with their already powerful enough sahigan pahr inflated into sizes like 90+ to 100 for a family member, not to mention 120 for a leader and heir, sizes which my poor 70 for a leader and heir, 52 or 47 for everyone else, can't handle. I actually tried bribing over some members from other factions just to see what would happen. They all stayed inordinately powerful in Baktrian bodyguard terms! The Parthian fellow with 80 men I bribed still had 80 when he came over to my side! And the Saka family member I bribed with 87 cataphract bodyguards still had 87 somatophylakes when he came over! Needless to say, my faction leader only still had 70+.

And this doesn't happen only in Baktria. As SPQR, I bribed a couple of Epeirote generals, one with 97 and one with 78. They came over with those numbers, and after I put them at the head of the First Army of the Republic and fought a coupla battles, they actually rose in number to 100 and 80... while my True Roman bodyguards stayed at their pathetic 48, 52, 48, 40... Small wonder why in every campaign my armies are led by foreign leaders while my own stay at home.

Any idea why this is so? Surely not another balancing thing to make things more fair for the AI, I hope... there are limits, after all. My generals > their generals, so my general's bodyguard > their bodyguard is only a logical step, especially since they stay the same size after they are bribed over to me instead of having their bodyguards reduced to Baktrian/Roman/human player proportions.