A 'ballista sally' isn't all that bad, really, because anytime you sally against the AI you're abusing. The AI's sally behavior can best be described as: Pull back out of tower range, form up, and wait. Respond only to massive casualties or the loss of all ranged troops. It's the nature of the game that if you sally you are taking advantage of bad AI and you simply can't help it.

It's called a ballista (Or catapult, or any extra long range troops, or cannon towers) sally because if you have a ballista the AI will sit there and let you kill them until you run out of ammo. Cannon towers are, IMHO, a horrific exploit of the AI under almost all circumstances and we should GA to never build them and sell them when we capture them at settlements. I sallied out of a cannon tower city in KotR, towers built by the Danish AI IIRC, and I abandoned the walls as fast as possible specifically so I could avoid the cannon tower abuse.

I do use pause, but if there were a way to turn it off for all players I would be okay with that. It would definitely change the way I approach battles involving more than 5 companies on each side, because when you get that large you can't manage all those men in the spread out manner necessary to correctly manipulate the AI for heavy cavalry charges. When I can get the Marseille battle posted you'll see what I mean.

Unfortunately, with replays working inconsistently, if we take out pause it will be difficult to get good screenshots for battle reports. I'm kinda okay with that, although I do love reading them, because it's about playing the game first, right? I remember some of FH's battles, and (IMHO) FH was a master of manipulating AI morale. If you understand exactly the factors involved in a unit's morale equation you can probably cause it to rout almost before it has a chance to kill any of your men. The AI does little or nothing to 'protect' it's morale situation.

As far as Staufen, I did call AG 'in character' on it, but I saw it more as leverage and less as a rules violation. Staufen belongs to the King, and I presumed if the King ordered something done there that it was okay to do it... but I'm not the rules expert. I thought prioritized recruitment had to go ahead of construction, but I can't find that anywhere in the rules either.