Turkish "Delight"?

[caravel]

The Byz. Crazy flexibility. Power troops with skirmishers and missile cav. Its like the best of both worlds.

The Hungarians are also a similarly, well moreso, hybrid faction. They have vanilla Horse Archers, the famous Szkeley Horse Archers and low cost javelin units, the Jogabby. You're also close to convenient rebel orthdox and pagan provinces as well as the Byzantine and Novgorod, so no papal problems.

Almohads are a good choice though for your next campaign Tony (currently playing an elmo campaign myself after the egyptian one started to get a bit predictable). They are not difficult to get into. The main thing is to tech up Granada to produce those +1 valour AUMs while pushing out ships to surround your coasts and prevent crusades jumping in. Once you're strong enough, both the Castillians and the Aragonese should be removed forcibly. Once you control all of Spain your trade will start to roll in and you'll have access to those northern Iron provinces. Your AUM from Granada can be routed through here and upgraded to make them very formidable indeed.

The one thing to remember when playing the elmos is that you don't have access to Saracen Infantry. So you have the choice of upgrading Nubian Spearmen as a substitute or using Muwahid Foot Soldiers. The former are preferable due to their larger base unit size, Muwahids are better used for flanking. The Murubatin Infantry (Javelins) are very good also but take some getting used to. The trick is to take them off skirmish and keep a line of Nubians read to relieve them if they get charged. Berber Camels I'm not overly impressed with but they're not terrible, they're slow so they don't have the same advantages as vanilla horse archers. They have an inferior attack to Berber Camels so they're not as good in melee, though they are the only mounted archers the Almohads can get hold of until you've teched up to Faris. Once they're available you can forget about the camels.