Hi all.

I'm new to these forums, but have been playing the total war games since the original Medieval TW.

I'm doing the English on M/M difficulty on turn 90ish.

Firstly I assaulted York an Wales, sieging them, but not directly attacking to so I could keep the army in tact for the Scotts. Once the Rebels had been sorted out Scotland was assaulted and defeated(resulting in me being excommunicated, but with an aging king it doesn't matter too much as you'll get reconciled as soon as he dies) . After taking Ireland too I converted all of the castles in the British Isles to towns to make maximum amounts of money and plunged money into any building that will generate money.

In my game the French seemed much more interested in going South and East so I used the foothold in Northern france to take the entire North and West coast of France up to Antwerp off the rebels. This gives plenty of places to produce an army, so the British Isles can concentrate on funding me. The French repeatedly attack my settlements in France, but the pope has been doing a great job of stopping us from having any sort of propper war.

The Danes decided to assault Antwerp, getting themselves excommunicated. This allowed me to remove them entirely, taking provinces all the way to Stockholm. The Portugese did the same, attacking with an underpowered army, getting themselves excommunicated and allowing me to take the Pyrenees region.

The best way I've found to conduct a war with Catholic contries like France is to build up 2-3 large armies, typically 2 artillery, 6 Archers, 1 General, 1 Mounted unit, 3 Spears and 7 Heavy infantry. Get all armies within striking distance of cities then in one turn each one assaults a settlement, using the artillery to batter down 2 adjacent holes in the wals and any nearby archer towers. The computer will then stick a few units infront of the gaps. Now take your archer units one at a time and walk about 10m away from the hole in the wall, set them to fire fire arrows and shoot the defenders almost point blank till they run out of ammo, then bring in the next archer unit. The computer is too dumb to send units past the wall to engage your archers, so you can inflict easily 50-70% casulties to the defenders doing this before charging in with the rest of your army to mop up when the timer/ammo runs low.

Doing this will allow you to take a few provinces before the Pope orders you to stop, by which time the damage is alredy done. It's also worth noting I haven't shared any land borders with a country who didn't decide to randomly attack me.