Let's talk about army stacks

[Lucasiewicz]

I'm playing Carthage at the moment and this is how my standard army stack looks like:

- 4 heavy infantry: 1 Sacred Band and 3 Liby-Phoenician Infantry
- 4 medium infantry: 4 Mercenary Warbands (from Iberia)
- 2 War Elephants
- 2 medium cavalry: 2 Byzacenic/Numidian Cavalry
- 2 light cavalry: 2 Mercenary Horsemen
- 8 skirmishers: 8 Mercenary Skirmishers (or sometimes the Sicilian, Corsican or Balearic variant)

It's a good mix between mercenary and Carthage's own troops. Though I don't feel like I have to choose mercenary because of a lack of manpower (I've never been out of manpower so far), I choose the mercenaries because their troops are better than Carthage's own (except for the heavy infantry). The Sacred Band is awesome. Though I have the resources to field more of them, I refrain from doing it because it feels ahistorical to me

Weak point of this composition is a situation with a large frontage of 12, but offcourse, it's more of a standard composition which can be fine tuned if needed in certain circumstances. In the early stages of the game so far this stack has never let me down. It's a bit weak on the sieging side of things too (only the 4 Mercenary Warbands have sieging abilities), but since I play around mostly in an undeveloped North-Africa and Iberia, it doesn't limit this stack too much.

[Southern Hunter]

8 Spartiate, 8 Cretan archers. Flanks aren't a thing, so no need for cavalry or other troops (so long as you aren't in mountains or forest, etc)

[bodkin]

How is everyone finding the AI’s stack building ability? Playing as Rome I can steamroll my neighbours as they never build a decent stack, they usually build a few weak ones that if combined would be more of a challenge to beat. Seems like the AI tries to spread its forces too thinly to cover every region. Maybe it’s just because they are limited in unit production compared to the Roman industrial war machine.

[Lucasiewicz]

I haven't paid as much attention to the AI's stack composition as to my stack composition. I plan to take some screens of battle's to get a better idea and hand over some compiled data to Pocus someday in the hope it can be improved if needed.