How strategic are you when preparing for a battle?

[Durango]

One of the things i do is intersperse high morale swords with low morale spears in the battle line. It works miracles as the spears protect the swords from cavalry charges and the swords fight enemy swords as they get entagle with the spears.

Nice! I have also thought about using such setups in battle, especially if real historical formations can be employed. How about the Spanish
Tercio, where the pikemen are (like you suggest) paired with arquebusiers and moved together dynamically on the battlefield? Once in a
custom battle, I recreated this by having one unit of swiss pikemen follow a unit of arqs and demoralizing the enemy before charging.
Worked pretty well.

I will try your combination in my new campaign

I remember when I made the blunder to use halberdier mercenaries and varangians in my High era campaign (Hard) as the Byzantines against the Horde. My biggest mistake is that I planned to press the Mongols in their corner of the map in order to redeuce maneuvrability of their horse archers. It was in Georgia but it stilled tired my men and finally they broke. It was only the bunch of crap spearmen and various archer units that saved the day. I had to bear my amry being decimated by the enemy arrows. Finally, his reinforcement also ended and after I managed to hold the key position. I won by time since the enemy simply stood on his position and did not dare to attack me either. I find it fair. The casualties were 3:1 so it was OK. My general won -6 morale and made him useless. I have already won a previous battle against the Horde so it was the end of the strength of the Horde. I managed to bring additional reinforcements during the next turn and the situation was patched. But from this moment on, I won't try to press the Horde. I must wait for them and slaughter them.

Sounds epic, man. But Väringar (Varangians) against HAs? Ouch. Mongols have one big weakness in my view, and that is missiles. Shoot the
HAs any way you can, and blast the Khan with a cannonball in his head! Also, as you said, spearmen should not be underestimated. They are
great as fodder units due to their longevity.

The difficulty of this game (along with Shogun) puts it a notch above the rest of the series, indeed. Losing is a possibility, as it should be.

Basically, I always pull in the most distant edge of the map on a hill. Then wait for the enemy to come. Basically, it takes me a lot of time to sort out my reinforcement, though I don't rely too much on them. I love when the enemy routs to send all the cavalry and the Bulgarian brigands to finish him off. With the valour bonus the Bulgarians can be good fighters.

Good tactic with the Bulgarian Inf. However, the valour bonus in map regions hurts the campaign AI. It will only try to tech up to the bonus unit
and then stop. Disabling these bonuses will help the AI build more and better troops. Besides, with strong incentives to build only certain units
in certain regions, why would anyone want to train anything else there?

About the valour units. it depends. Usually when I face an enemy full with archers (Horde is an exception), I tend to put lower valoured units on the field with the hope I can save the higher valoured.

I do this as well. Peasants work the best though, if you are ruthless like me....hehehe.....

"-But Sire, won't we hit our own troops?"

"-Yes....but we'll hit theirs as well......arrows cost money. Attack."

Braveheart

Spanish are also awesome but I don't have much time recently. :P

Time is a luxury. That's why it's so annoying to wait 70.000 turns to get the possibility that an Armored Almughavar will crawl out of
the hole in the ground when the planets align and show up in the Inn....