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[Hellenikon]

What I found with the Ptolemids is that their regional units are poor in substituting your hellenistic ones, so if you want heavy infantry or cavalry you better get the cash ready to hire some mercenaries. In the nex release they'll have even less hellenistic manpower, due to a script representing garrison units. The machimoi phalanx are more cost effective than the real deal phalanxes, meaning that in a battleline, some parts will see little action and you don't require full fledged phalangitai for what the machimoi offer, which is a sarissa wall of the same length than the professionals (unlike the pantodapoi). Others are also decent but not game changing, like the lybians acting as good skirmishers with big shields who absorb fire, and the nubians archers who do the same thing. The best regional unit in my experience is the numidian cavalry, which are available in the eastern parts of your starting domains through native colonies.

The solution for the poor recruitment option for the ptolemids is to expand into coele-syria and syria, and grab those auxiliary units, like median cavalry or the syrian archers (cretans are the placeholder). Regions like anatolia offer much more robust native recruitment to compliment your limited hellenistic units, so it is worthwhile to expand there too. My solution to get the most out of egypt was to rely on basilike patris, which means one in Alexandria and another in Diospolis Megale (which I renamed Ptolemais Hermiou, to represent that other hellenistic city in the area). With hellenistic colonies in the lower, middle and upper nile, it creates a decent powerhouse of recruitment in a region that is otherwise lacking in native units. If you put your basilike patris elsewhere then that's ok too, but at least this way you transform your mediocre home region into a more useful one for recruitment. The bonus to public order also helps to deal with the unrest that inevitably will come from the absence of the basileus.

I don't agree with the way the machimoi phalangitai are linked to unrest, because it is a simplistic way to depict a more complicated situation of what happened after Raphia. Authors like Christelle Fischer-Bovet (Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt) talk about just how complex the revolts were, it was more akin to the "mercenary war" of Carthage, combined with opportunism. The idea of making a predetermined limit of units, and from there unrest starting, seems like a rethread of the simplistic view that polybius offered "The kings of egypt fell because they armed the natives". It should probably be linked to having enough spare cash to pay for bribes and promotions, as well as periodic unrest due to below average nile floods, or other political events like defeats that generate unrest.

The way the Ptolemids changed their army after the phase of unrest, meant that they became far more entrenched in egypt that their enemies the seleucids were in any territory. I think there should be some late reforms to represent this late thureophoroi based army, cheaper and more plentiful. It probably should solve all those manpower issues we talked previously, developing into a more realistic army for the expenses the ptolemids could afford, and which was mainly a policing and defensive force rather than an aggressive one. In the chaos of the dynastic struggles, this army maintained it's role and later on the romans decided these helleno-egyptian kleruchs would be adequate cavalry for their auxilia. It means that it held military value throughout the period, despite the political instability.