I can't say I liked having to reduce my army, build for ten years, and then start fighting battles. When I played the Casse I did not disband all of my army, so I probably appeared less appetising to the independents, and then spent about ten years building up my economy and infrastructure before uniting the isles and accquiring some of the Low Countries.

I have to say that I didn't really enjoy the procession of end-turn clicks before getting into the "meat" of the game; I do hope that the Casse have been made a bit more interesting "out of the box" for EB 0.8.