Greetings,

Well, it's been awhile since I posted here. Anyway, I just finished my first short campaign as the English. I had tried the French on medium/medium difficulty, but I got slaughtered in relatively short order. Between the Inquistor running around burning the majority of my family members and agents, and all the foreign merchants destroying the local ones, it was very messy.

So, after taking a peek around here, I noticed you could change the amount of time per turn, so I changed to 2.0 (4 turns per year, I think) and restarted as English on Easy/Medium. I had a great deal more success this time around, since the Inquistors don't seem to be able to cross water. The foreign merchants seemed to leave my own alone for the most part as well.

The two most pressing problems I'm having seem to be combat and piety. No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot raise the piety of my family members. It always remains at 1 or 2, perhaps 3 at the most. I made a point of always having the best possible religious building and having at least two priests in every settlement or castle. This had no effect that I could see of. Alot of my priests ended up becoming heretics before too long. It would be nice to have a dialog box telling me this, it would be more helpful then wondering what happened to my priest in X town or castle.

Combat is something different entirely. My units don't seem to really try to surround the enemy, they space out no matter what I tend to do and most of them sit there while only a small portion of the unit is actually fighting the enemy. Is it designed to be that way or is that a problem that needs to addressed? Much the same applies for cavalry, they don't seem to pay much attention to formation. Now, I could very well be wrong about this but I had assumed that when one double clicks and has them charge the enemy, that they would infact close the gap as quickly as possible and then charge in for the kill. I've watched them, but they don't seem to do this. The lances are ready as they charge, but they lose cohesion and their lances never come down, they simply disappear and melee weapons are readied when they hit the enemy.

I checked out the stick at the top which says to have them walk upto the enemy and they will do their charge on their own. This seems to work, most of the time. It's sorta a hit or miss kind of thing and is truly making my cavalry useless, not that the English cavalry seems to be terrible effective anyway :)

The AI doesn't seem to have much problem making full use of their own cavalry, much to my dismay. In two seperate battles, I recall a unit of my Armored Swordmen being cut down by a single charge from French Feudal Knights. My general was considerably more capable then the French's general. Then in a different battle, I tried the same thing with English Knights on some Dismounted Feudal Knights of the French. My knights rode into them with only swords and promptly got cut to pieces to the last man.

Otherwise I'm having few other problems. Though a strange one popped up near the end. Freshly trained units would be available to be retrained over and over and there wasn't anything being gained. Not sure what causes that.

So, I guess my questions would be thus:

1) Is there any advice to better utilize my cavalry? Any way to mod the behavior so they always charge?

2) How does one build up Piety on family members? Leaving them in a town with a religious building doesn't seem to have much positive effect.

I'm gonna restart my French campaign on Medium/Medium and see if I do any better, now that I know a little bit more of the game mechanics. Perhaps observing the AI's use of cavalry might provide some insight. Any help is appreciated :)