Conquered the rest of Thrace and built up my army. I find these units break easy because its still early game. All the buildings, generals, and tech add to morale and fatigue so early game has a small amount, I imagine late game will be longer for it.
After I conquered Thrace I upgraded my men with gold armor, shields, and weapons as well as swapped out older levy pike units for standard pikemen, and my slingers for archers. Sarissa cavalry for those awesome fast rear charges or to run down skirmishers.
I built 3 additional armies (5 pikemen, 2 sarissa cavalry, 1 hoplite, 3 archers, and companion cavalry general for all 5 armies). I left one in each provincial capital and took my 3 armies off to Crete to fight Knossos. Landed there and engaged his army. It was by far the largest fight I ever had. Because of unit limitations I was short 500 of my troops. I ended up have 4 companion cav, 5 sarissa cav, 4 archers, 8 pikemen and 1 hoplite. Was a huge battle. the frame rate suffered a bit.
Macedon:
Deployed: 4520
Lost: 178
Kills: 4208
Knossos:
Deployed: 4860
Lost: 4211
Kills: 177
Battle duration, 12 minutes and 12 seconds.
A good 3 minutes waiting for my units to get into position once the other half showed up. Because of the scale of the battle I did use some hammer and anvil tactics but once their spearmen got into contact with my pikemen they were slaughtered. I am not sure if its because they were all vets, had gold armor, shield, and weapons, or where better units. Half my sarissa cav flanked his left flank, the other half cirlced around killing skirmishers. My companion cav crushed his right flank and his reserves.
oddly enough the auto fight would have had me loose all but 20% of my troops.
only now do I see the achievement "A League of Their Own" as Macedon establish Athens, epirus and Sparta as client states...well seeing as I declared war on epirus and wiped them out by turn 3 I missed out on that. Looks like if you fill up the empire bar a civil war breaks out?
