Well, after much tinkering around and adjusting this or that, I seemed to have succeeded in at least figuring things out and adjusting my tactics to something that would match the AI. The castle and town difference is what threw me off, I suppose. I've been doing more research and then actual playing. I've started and restarted a dozen times.

I changed the turns back to default from my 1.00 setting, to make sure it wasn't having any effect on the AI or the like. I didn't notice any real effects, yet.

E/E will have to do for now, while I play around with things. In one game, I removed the Papacy completely. It seems to work well enough, except it can unbalance things unless you make sure you change the Papal States provinces to Rebel. In the end, it doesn't really make much difference to the AI whether or not the Papacy is there or not.

Autoresolve seems to be extremely efficient, it does a far better job then I can seem to do. I recall one battle between a Rebel force and one of my General's, the odds were just about even, save for the fact that my General had two Command. The autoresolve managed to come out without losing a single man. Until the issues with the cavalry and infantry are addressed, I'm only playing battles that are decisive and the autoresolve doesn't seeem to do well, like sieges.

Considering how well the engine runs, it's suprising to see CA was sloppy about removing all the references to all the old RTW assets. A few hours of play will generate a pretty sizeable log file in the game directory of errors. They should definately address that when the more serious bugs have been fixed. Still, they did an excellent job optimizing the engine. I ran equal simulations on BI and MTW2 with the same amount of men on both sides, using as identical settings as I could get. I'm getting twice the framerate out of MTW2 as I'm getting out of RTW. This is especially apparent in sieges with large amounts of buildings, it used to crawl in RTW, but now even with Bloom on it runs very well. They did a good job optimizing and tighting up the code in that regard, kudos to them for that. :)

The heavy focus of Religion is detracting from gameplay enjoyment so far. I'm either punished for having too much Piety or having too little. Merchant and diplomats are a good case in point. A town with a lot of religious buildings will produce intolerant traits that make the Merchants or Diplomats nearly useless. "Religiously intolernat" and the like should be removed, or lessened to a great deal, it makes very little sense to punish a player for being too religious. Better yet, make them only apply to different religions instead of a broad reduction to the appropriate skills.

AI behaviour is strange, to say the least. As someone above said, never trust the AI to not attack a undefended town. This does seem to be the case. This in and of itself makes a diplomacy simply a useless function if you can't rely on the AI to actually work with you, the "Relations" indicator is even more pointless. If my relations are "Perfect" and he attacks me anyway, what good is it? They have done this many times without reason or provocation. I've gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid doing anything to displease them.

Well, I suppose that went off topic but might as well share some observations, some one may find them useful. In my current game, I'm actually doing well for a change as France. I've been more or less keeping to myself and trying to otherwise keep everyone else happy, all the while observing the AI. From what I can tell, they pay little attention to the Pope. Less then 20 turns into the game, Venice and Milan had both been promptly excommunicated for attacking other Cathloic factions. They didn't make an attempt to appease the Pope at all, they simply continued on their rampage against the other factions. Not much point in having the Papacy if the AI doesn't pay any attention to it. Stiffer penalties would be better I think, so they have a reason to try and play with some sense.

I reinstalled after playing around with all the various things that can be turned on and off. I'm enjoying it somehwhat now. The Rebels that keep spawning in my territory are grating on my nerves, I've tried in previous games to reduce or eliminate them by chaging the "Brigand Spawn" value (Something like that, I can't remember the exact variable) to different values but neither lowering or raising it had no effect. I tried disabling the "Rebelling_Characters_Active" value but that only resulted in a error if I tried to start a new campaign. The log file said something about "Must have at least two factions." I'm not a modder, so I don't know what that's about.

I'll post more observations later and progress.