Made for conquest...

[Medieval Assassin]

The danes = A pwn.

[TomPaine]

The Spanish in Early are great for quick, painless, and cheap expansion. Just crusade your way down through the almohads, over to egypt, up to turkey, and through Byzantium. You can make the game a boring fait-accompli by 1145! You'll never see Lancers! Yeah, so maybe it's not all for the best.

[quadalpha]

Try attacking the HRE with Poland within 5 turns. The pope won't care, and if you're lucky and willing to trade provinces a few times, and if you fight all the battles, you have a pretty good chance. Get hold of all the mounted missile units you can.

[Sociopsychoactive]

Some of you are forgetting, agressive early expantion from the start. While the danes have some great heavy infantry it's a good twenty years before you can muster a force capable of taking on anyone else. While Byzantines have some good stuff too, and a great empire to start, it;s almost all completely undeveloped and you only have Constantinople to pump out troops.

HRE is considered weak by people because you see it fall so easy and often under the AI, but if you go aggressive and expantionist early, then they can rock. They have good territory, rich farmland, many enemies to pick from, including rebels if the pope is harrassing you, or even better if you really want a fight go kill the pope. If you attack and expand then the threat of civil war is none existant, you have the awesome swabian swordsmen, all the standard christian units and an unrivaled starting position for the extreamly agressive ruler.

Spain is almost as good, but the smaller starting empire means you have to pick your fights carefully, fighting north very early on is a recipy for disaster. They have some very good units, and having a muslim enemy is always good, but for an aggressivle expantionist they lack the choice of targets you get with HRE, plus with HRE you HAVE to go aggressive expantionist early on, making it seem a bit more worthwhile.

The almo's take quite a bit of teching up, as do many factions, but then again so do the HRE, so they might be worth a shot, but I'm guessing your not going for HA tactics, or merely desert battles, so most of the almohads advantages are instantly gone.

So I agree with you completely, HRE rock for agressive expantion early on.

[Fragony]

I say the Poles, I always go for the Germans and just keep going, before you know it you have half the map. Then to the east for even more massive territories.