Crete was a Greek City State too, and while I wouldn't mind them getting a slightly weaker hoplite or more expensive hoplite, due to their archers, but shouldn't they still have hoplites?

Agree. I also want to add that the spearmen unit is so weak as to be almost unless. I had 3 of them routed by some piddling cavalry. Sure they were thessalian cavalry or something like that but spearmen are designed to hold off cavalry. Those spearmen are unusable except as garrison.

That's about exactly what happened to me, the archers are even inferior in every way to Persian archers so what are we supposed to build for military as Crete? Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Thanks for the quick response I was just getting tired of relying on essentially useless infantry. You guys weren't kidding when the description said useful for just garrison lol.

My only other balance thing is maybe in sandbox we should be allowed to something similar to colonization from singleplayer campaign? Maybe after you own a city for "x" number of years it becomes your faction's? My game as aetolian league quickly became near impossible financially because all your troops have to be mercenaries since they only have 2 starting cities and manpower became a huge problem =/

I agree on the colonization thing, but maybe a better way would be after x number of cities you capture you can colonize an additional city. Then you would be given a unit in your hometown which would convert any city you own into your current faction but would be consumed on use. This way you could strategically colonize cities throughout the world while rewarding you for expansion.

This is the same kind of thing ancient Greeks did anyways - After major expansion they would sometimes colonize strong cities in order to strengthen their hold on an area. The thing could be linear - every 10 cities for example you get one - or it could be exponential allowing early expansion to build up a decent home faction area first, maybe going 1 capture, then 3 capture, then 5 capture then 6 capture then 10 capture, etc.

Strategic colonization makes sense, but maybe you should just need to take the population out of your existing cities, rather than conquer a certain number. You should post that in a thread not ostensibly about Cretan hoplites. Not that Crete's hoplites didn't deserve this thread.