I think you saw enough battles with Sabyn for some time.
Only difference was that I decided to hire Arabian Slingers and those guys proved to be pretty devastating. They killed 231 enemies and they have only 120 men in unit.
Our loyal Satrap Timarchos have to defend his realm again.
Fact that his bodyguards are horse archers is pretty nice, I actually think about hiring some horse archers here to deal with small enemy stacks.
I don't even remember how many times we defended this city and our faction leader is running out of troops (and we don't even have a chance to recruit any mercenaries because we are at siege every turn).
Timer run out and Greeks lost.
Baktrians tries to lift the siege of Baktra, this stack don't have any general but it's Sarpedon's army and they are very experienced.
Baktra garrison is main threat here and they are behind us, we have to run to this hill and turn around.
They send some cav to annoy us but we are almost in our positions so we should be able to deal with them.
They have more archers/skirmishers and try to us it to their advantage. We have to do this "charging phalanx" thingy.
Now we have to collapse our flank on them while our center keeps them in one place.
Rat trap, like in the old days of Ptolemaic wars.
Hypaspistai have spears as secondary weapon so I used ALT+RCLICK to make them to use them against Baktrian cav, even though I don't know if those spears help them fight cavalry (not every spearmen have bonuses against cav, those spears might be just for shits and giggles).
And then we send our Prodromoi to harass Baktrian skirmishers.
We killed both family members they had here and most of their army, I think Baktra should be ours.
Yes, it is. We are going to enslave the shit out of them for spawning this elephants stack.
And Trapezous surrendered to our cheapo army so now we officialy hold whole asia minor and most of caucasus.
Large Sauromatae presence in this region is scary but I don't think we can afford to just leave our army here to scare off nomads. We will leave garrison of 3 native phalangitai units and our cheapo army will go to hellas proper nad maybe save our faction leader ass.
Saka Rauka is at war with Baktria but they stopped fighting since we destroyed Pahlava and are concentrating their efforts on me (HUMAN PLAYER DETECTED! EXTERMINATE!).
We have one free army in anatolia, we could send it to greece and try to save our faction leader (and probably get another army stuck in endless siege in greece). But I decided to do something sensible this time and landed in Rhodos so Koinon Hellenon have two fronts now.
Kalinikos and what is left of his army are all kinds of fucked, no point in trying to save him.
After we are done with Rhodos we will conquer Krete because islands are awesome in this game, basically super-safe money makers.
We are getting dangerously close to Sabyn cities and they are getting desperate.
They are coming from two sides but we have enough phalangitai to cover our flank.
I hired another unit of Arabian Slingers because they are fucking awesome. Slingers are a bit OP in EB but AI don't spam them so EB team never "nerfed" them. EB is quite old mod (and EB team formed before RTW was even released, at first they wanted to "help" CA with proper representation of barbarian factions but CA told them to go fuck themselves) and went through a lot of changes but they are still some "quirks" here and there, slingers are one of them. But even slingers are just slightly OP it's nothing like Savaran from Invasio Barbarorum: Flagellum Dei that made Sassanids unbeatable and never were fixed.
Like pretty much always, I told my skirmishers to fall back too late, you can set them in "skirmish mode" but AI does even worse job at it than I do.
First Sabyn army have no cavalry to speak of so our Cats are free to bring death and destruction behind enemy lines.
First army is almost dead because enemy archers/skirmishers target our archers/skirmishers instead of phalanx and Sabyn infantry have absolutely no chance against phalangitai because they have layer of butter for armor.
Now we have to turn around and deal with secound army (which have mostly cavalry and "heavy" infantry).
Well, I'm laughing at Sabyn armor but our infantry is using Linothorax and thats fucking LINEN armor, how it could protect anyone from anything other than fart is beyond me. But people are sayind that Linothorax actually worked, so the fuck I know.
Thorakitai Argyraspides have chainmails tough. Chainmails are "Eric Clapton" armour, they offer best results with minimal BLING!.
Muscled Armours of Hypaspistai are "Slash" armour, chicks love it but real men know it's all about BLING, not results.
Ok... After this highly insightful armory review we can finish crushing sand niggers.
No point in trying to chase them, our Cats are exhausted.
Slingers killed 200 dudes each again, and they have only 120 guys in unit.
Kalinikos, you better pull off some crazy shit or you are dead.
Ha, fak u papirus u suck. Well, they didn't have general so combination of phalangitai in narrows street and constant storm of fire arrows proved enough to break them.
And Pella is no longer under siege and we can recruit some mercenaries.
Also, we finally reached Sabyn cities after eternity of crossing desert. Now they will know how stupid they were starting this war.