Balance Problems

[sudo1996]

I've been playing this mod and love the historical accuracy and the wide variety of units to choose from. But after playing into some campaigns (the longest being Hayasdan), some things are bugging me a lot, and I hardly want to play anymore. Am I doing something wrong, or do we agree about these problems?

1. Phalanxes are overpowered. In regular RTW, you could hit them in the side or rear and rout them pretty easily. That is not the case in EB. They only lose a few men when I hit from behind with ANYTHING, then they turn around and slaughter mine either with spears or their secondary weapons (axes). You'd think a perfectly coordinated charge with 2 units of my best cataphracts would do it, but no. I can only ever effectively fight them using archers/slingers, and they take a ton of ammo to kill, seemingly more than in regular RTW. And the phalanxes don't even cost that much. Frustrating because the Alexander factions throw tons of them at me in every battle.

2. Slingers are overpowered, especially Celtic ones. The Celtic ones, like the rest, are super inexpensive, and they're the deadliest projectile units I've seen. I've tried inexpensive Celtic slinger armies against expensive armies of varying sorts in custom battles, and the slingers always win easily. I think this is even worse than the phalanxes. I've banned myself from using Celtic slingers during my Carthaginian campaign where I took over some Gallic land, and I consider it a bit of a cheat to use any kind of slinger unit.

3. Cavalry is very weak and crazy expensive, with exceptions below. The weakness is due to the unit movement and the stats. Their attack power is terribly low, and they do dumb things. Sometimes, they'll charge "through" an enemy unit and repeatedly turn around, not really doing any damage. They don't seem to be able to charge at anything in skirmish mode, and attacking while "pursuing" hardly does anything. They can charge at a moving unit but will stop after hitting the first few men. They don't do any real damage while running through enemies, only when you directly click to attack them. They often die while charging (well maybe this is realism, but it's still another weakness to add to the list). Oh, and spear units all have a big bonus against them, so that basically means I shouldn't use them against 90% of any army I'll fight since there are so many spear units. So I don't use them for anything except killing routing units and maybe killing an unprotected general.

4. The Saroumatae and Sakka have very strong units that are cheap and easy to produce in campaign, and it's to a point that seems unfair. Somehow, their ranged cavalry doesn't cost too much and does well in both ranged and hand-to-hand combat. Their base-level archers have great range and good stats otherwise. They'll destroy any similar army of ranged units from any other faction, and in any battle in general, they seem to have an advantage. In the campaign, it's very easy to build up a settlement enough to make amazing horse archers. As Hayasdan, I've yet to have a settlement capable of making my comparable but more expensive noble horse archers.