Ok I've been playing with my buddy and he uses Macedon but I cannot defeat him with Rome. We use 40k money, syrian flats map and his army setup is the following:
9 royal pikemen - almost fully upgraded
5 cretan archers, full attack and 1 exp
3 to 4 Cavalry units almost fully upgraded.
His deployment is the following:
p=pikemen
a=archers
c=cavalry
---This is where my army is----
p p p p p p
a a a a a
p p p
c c c c
Generally I find that using my roman archer auxilia against him isn't effective because his cretans are too strong. Generally I use around 8 or 9 fully upgraded urbans (except for attack), and 5 praetorian fully upgraded. That's my whole army. My tactic is to pin his pikes with urbans from the front, and eliminate his cavalry as I usually have the cav advantage, and then to strike pinned phalanxes from the rear but those reserves are pesky,he'll get 1 or 2 pikes from his reserve line into the cav battle. During this period his archers will rain arrows on my urbans making them rout. No surprise there as urbans engaged against a phalanx head on, under arrow fire will undoubtedly rout quickly. I the key is to eliminate his archers, but I aways lead the cavalry attack from only 1 flank, maybe i should get more cav and attack from both sides so that the archers are in more danger? Or maybe try to breach and create a hole in his line, but this is diffcult to do. Any suggestions?