I'm having a lot of fun with it since the update. So far I've done a couple of games as Bactria, a few abortive games as Rome, and lately a game as Maurya and a game as Epirus. The latter was really fun, but Pyrrhos always is since he starts off in such a weak position but has such big opportunities for growth if you play him right. I followed a strategy suggested on Reddit of fabricating claims on southern Italy and invading them immediately, before the mission tree nudges you to do so. I was able to secure most of Magna Graecia south of the Samnites before Rome got its boots on, so to speak, even being assisted by some of the Roman stacks in doing so, then integrated the two largest cultures in the region (each of which was about as big as Epirote culture) so that I could get a reasonably sized set of levies (along with changing my levies law to the one that maximizes your levy rather than the one that allows you a Royal Guard).
Afterwards, I backstabbed Macedon to take the southern parts of Epirus and Aetolia, then turned around and
finally got to invading Rome itself rather than finishing up the Consolidation mission you have at the start of the game. That was definitely dicy--Rome had more men than I did, but I had a better navy and was able to besiege and sack the cities of Latium, hire a mercenary band, and defeat them in detail using Pyrrhos' skills and the high discipline of my forces (I had used all of the starting innovations to buy boosts to my levies and discipline) to my advantage. Even so, after I had captured all of Roman Magna Graecia and Latium
and sieged down one of their feudatories they
still managed to pull an 18k stack out of their butt and engage Pyrrhos' 8-9k...fortunately, I had enough warscore that I was able to just pull out of the war with Magna Graecia and Latium right then
Since then Rome has been a bit of a butt monkey, but Etruria has really taken off and eaten a quarter of Gaul. I guess "Gallias Italiam fato consumet" (for some undoubtedly atrocious machine-translated Latin), or rather the equivalent in Etruscan.
With all of that behind me, I was able to pretty decisively defeat Carthage, although they had a weird thing where I kept "winning" my naval battles with them even though I took heavier losses which were mostly captured by them...well, whatever, it allowed me to siege and capture Carthage itself, in addition to annexing all of Sicily (Syracuse had taken over the entire eastern half, then lost to Carthage...I ate up their remnants after having been allied to them, then attacked Carthage), nicely finishing up that mission tree. The weird thing was that it bugged out the first time and got stuck on me doing diplomatic things instead of allowing me to move on, so I had to abort it and restart it to allow me to finish. Kind of annoying...
So, western hegemony achieved, I finally turned back to Greece...the weird thing about the situation there was that Macedon, the Antigonids, and Thrace all existed and posed issues, along with Egypt. The Peloponnesian peninsula had largely consolidated into a "pan-Hellenic league" under Thrace (the big winner of the Diadochi in the west) controlling the old Spartan lands, an Argolis federation controlling, well, the Argolis and allied with Egypt, and Himera controlling the remainder of the peninsula. The Antigonids controlled the Corinthian isthmus, the eastern half of Euboea, and parts of Macedonia, Macedon controlled northern Boeotia and southern Thessaly, and Thrace had most of the rest of Macedonia, and had puppeted Macedon. Fortunately, I was able to some dexterity to evade the various alliances and slowly absorb the whole of Greece and (southern) Macedonia, along with southern Thrace, so that I was able to reform Macedon and relocate to Pella as my new capital. Just in time, too, because Pyrrhos recently started developing symptoms of dementia and isn't long for this world. I also have everything set up to pinball from Greek to Levantine to Punic to Italic traditions, so I should be dabbing on everyone in a few decades with my space marine Epirotes and Macedonians.
Unfortunately, the succession looks...bad. Pyrrhos had astoundingly bad luck in spouses in this game, and while he had two sons by one of the starting ladies with the Blood of the Argeads trait (very good!), one of them died prematurely and the other is in his forties, in very poor health (albeit not sick
now), and only has a single two-year-old daughter. He and his wife
really need to get on having some more kids, especially sons! I didn't do all of this for Pyrrhos' bloodline to die out less than a century into the game!
Aside from that, there's two main things I regret about what I've done so far in the game. First, I finished the Molossian Consolidation mission a bit earlier than I probably should have, and so didn't unlock Dione and possibly Apollo Akitakos
Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and fix that. Second, I deified Pyrrhos as Herakles pretty early on, instead of waiting to unlock Achilles and deifying him as, well, the latter-day incarnation of the latter. Considering everything he's achieved and the position of Achilles in Epirote culture, it would be more fitting. This seems more fixable, though, by switching him out, waiting twenty years (he'll definitely be dead by then) and re-deifying him after his old cult is forgotten.
If I was to do this again I would probably follow basically the same strategy but put off finishing the Molossian Consolidation mission a bit so that I could actually finish it. Rome wasn't in a huge hurry to attack me, after all, and it might have been an easier fight if I had waited for them to get in a tussle with Etruria before making my move. I would also obviously have delayed deifying Pyrrhos until Achilles was unlocked. But otherwise I think I did about as well as you could reasonably expect given the situation I was in.
