Being somewhat of a noob myself, I have a question.

I just fought a battle playing as HRE. I'm new to M2TW, but I've had RTW for a while.

M/M, I've ruined the Milanese, Danes, Poles, Hungarians, and am just about done with France. I really like it! The campaign strategy has a few more layers than RTW, which makes it quite engrossing (and more difficult IMO).

So the English, like the five dead factions before them, declared war on me for fun. (BTW it seems that when you're #1 all the AI factions are automatically out for your head, even worse than RTW.)

And so I put a grand army together; the best High Middle Age army I could get:

2 Gothic Knights
2 Imperial Knights
6 Zwei Handers (they are my question)
2 Dismounted Feudal Knights
2 Armored Sergeants
6 Peasant Crossbowmen

And I sailed them and another full-stack (with a higher % of militia) to England.

And then I engaged a big army of English, just glorying in the ruin I would bring on them.

Ruin them I did, but woooooaaahh... and now I get to my question:

WHAT IN THE WORLD do you do with Zwei Handers? Their description indicates that they are basically the front line of assault troops.

They were stopped cold by English Dismounted Feudal Knights, and would have been annihilated by some English Armored Swordsmen, if my cavalry hadn't been so extraordinarily effective.

I was under the impression that the HRE forges its empire with Zwei Handers and Gothic Knights. The Goths were phenomenal; the Zwei Handers impressed me in the opposite direction. They were pathetic. And their stats are pretty low, really. They're better than the "Dismounted English Knights" line of units (foot knights with polearms), but not by much.

What in the world is wrong with them? I'm tempted to go into the files and mod them with higher stats, or at LEAST make them "effective against armor."

Anyways I'm wondering what you're supposed to do with them? Am I using them wrong? It seemed pretty obvious that they are intended to be assault troops.