I've been playing on H/VH with the expanded gametime patch from the Org main page (which I absolutely love, as I like to take my time and not rush it too much. 1200 turns is a beautiful amount of time, heh) Anyways, my first goal as the English, as it was in MTW, was to secure the British isles, which I did so swiftly. I beat the French to Rennes, Antwerp, and Bruges, at which point the Danish began attacking me, probably because Hungary was completely dominating everything east of Denmark, and the HRE had become mostly Milanese territory. After a gruleing amount of turns to defeat the French; they somehow were recruiting at least 2 full stacks of armies every turn despite only holdling Paris, Rheims, Bordeux, and Angers, I'm facing Milan, the clear second strongest faction at the moment, second of course to myself in everything but financial. I'm about 125 turns in, I believe.

Anyways, I absolutely hate and despise the Milanese in this game. I don't know if other people have encountered the same thing, but generally a Milanese army is entirely composed of Genoan Crossbowmen, with a spattering of ridiculously accurate catapults and ballistas and the usual general's bodyguard (they have killed my general severl times now after only a couple barrages, which is incredibly annoying...). They also sometimes tow along one or two units of infantry, I think it's broken lances, which they rarely seem to use.

My problem is a cost-effective way to deal with these armies. They seem to be able to produce 2 or 3 full stacks of these clone armies every turn. My armies are generally made up of 5 units of retinue and yeoman archers right now, with the rest of the stack split between Demi-lancers and armoured swordsmen. I've found the most effective way of beating them seems to be forming a long line of battle with my cavalry, then walking towards them and engaging a massive charge, which usually crushes about 45% of enemy troops on impact and routs the rest. However, it's rarely cost-effective as to train 6-8 units of cavalry every other turn is taxing, especially when I need to maintain a strong prescence in Antwerp to fend off numerous attacks by the Danes.

I've tried simply matching them blow-to-blow with archers, but their pavises make the the kill ratio something like 7:3 in my favor, not nearly cost-effective enough, especially as their catapults, ballistas, and treb's absolutely devastate my expensive units, even when put on loose formation.

I've also found that unless I can overwhelm units of GXmen, they will inflict large amount of casualties on my swordsmen and cavalry. Has anyone found a better tactic at beating the pesky Milanese consistently with less than 10% losses? It doesn't help that my pope-o-meter sucks (that's probably my worst ability in this game, or perhaps stems on laziness of not interacting much with the Papal States...) and that the Milanese have a knack for stacking the College with their home-grown Cardinals.