Originally posted by Caravel
How many times have I done that? It takes a lot of restraint and forsight to know when the rout is for real. I have often had my exhausted heavy cav surprised by rallying units and/or reinforcements at the other side of the field and utterly destroyed. When in critical defensive battles I tend to avoid pursuing routers all together and set my whole infantry formation to hold position, preferably perched atop a hill. This prevents them from following enemies of their own accord. My cavalry I hold in reserve to protect the flanks and briefly hit routers, but not pursue them.
The best thing to do is to use the grouping feature which in this version of the TW engine is supreme; basically say you have spears swords archers a knight general and a bunch of seargents. Now group thus;
control plus shift plus number all together, say 1 for swords, 2 for spears, 3 archers, 4 for seargents, 5 for general. You can have over or subgroups too, say you want a combined version of the general and one seargent use 6. Recall with control plus number. In this way you have a very quick way to access main army components - you can micro individually from picking at the moment of action in the screen to pull a flank charge while all the group of seargents say is on the move.

It works also wonders after the main melee to get your melee troops quickly together or otherwise they scatter as you say.

!it burnsus!