I find the 'battle huge stack every turn' game to be not very fun.

I have doubled the price of army maintenance, and that is keeping me very poor indeed. I increased the financial assistance to other countries, to keep them 'in the black'. It is too early to tell whether they will expand appropriately given the new cost system.

As Rome, I have taken Southern Italy, but cannot afford to properly integrate it yet. I can build few buildings, and can barely keep my 2 legions in the field (1 H, 1P, 1T, 1 Equites, 1 Accensi each legion). I have Leves guarding each town.

Now that is a challenge :-)

p.s. Finding Accensi to be a 'problem'. They are meant to be very weak troops, but the fact that they have a sling makes them the most useful thing around. I am tempted to take their ammo down to 1 or something, to make them far more useless (as they indeed were most of the time).