On a side note, most people seem to ignore longbow units that aren't English. If you want to see a rediculously good missile unit use French Scots Guard, a powerful longbowman in plate-mail, who is also skilled in melee. In every test I've run myself SG have beaten every (non-gunpowder) missile unit in the game, including ret. longbowmen and Aventurier, supposedly the most offensively powerful xbow unit. The only really close duel was with sherwood archers, where both units always ran out of arrows, and the SG won in melee. Besides these unit vs unit tests, playing with the French quite a bit in the field has made me realize a far superior tactical value in the SG lonbowman over the Aventurier, and I rarely use just the xbow anymore.

My $.02