A started campaign with Moors (they were Almohads in MTW which is better by my opinion since most Muslim empires were named by their ruling dynasty, Egyptians were Fatimids), and i had absolutely no problem conquering Spain and France using lots of spearman in defensive stance to hold a line, a couple of archers to provoke AI to advance and a lot of Arab calvary to flank. I never lost a battle (playing on normal) but i am still pretty sure that in multiplayer any player no matter how skilled will lose leading Moors vs. France in hands of decent player.

I did a lot of tests in custom battle regarding calvary vs. spears and now i am convinced that they really messed this up. Berber spearman has a spear of about his height, which means that when he grips it he will still have around 1.2 meters of spear in front of him, which is more than enough to plunge it into throat of a horse in full charge. The next "wave" of horsemen will then have to worry about a obstacle (a dead horse in this case) and a spear. And so on. You get the basic idea.

As for swords versus spears, in first Medieval that was the case, and i think that it is logical. Spear has it`s length and when you came close enough it is pretty useless. As for spears in close formations supporting each other well basically spearman left or right of you can`t really support you very much because they have a swordsman in front of them also, and for the back rows when a swordsman goes past the first spear and its "area of usefulness" it has nothing to worry about defending from that spearman joust coming close enough to actually kill him and he can focus on defending from the next spear in line. Most of the swordsmen in game have this in their unit description but the spearman units in my game are so good against swords (they will lose eventually) because they are able to hold those dismounted knights for so long that i have the time to walk my flanking units behind arrange them in formations and smash them from the back.

Horse archers are good, but they are unable to do significant damage to armored units to make micromanaging lots of them worth in battle. Mounted archers are less precise than foot archers, and they have no AP abilities. They are excellent in the beginning until Catholics start to produce heavier
armor. And some Catholics have really good HA (or crossbowmen, some of them are AP) later so that HA are not such a big advantage to easter factions to really make up for everything else.

But this is still the greatest strategy game i played (ok, alpha centauri but this games are hardy comparable). And i had significantly more problems playing catholics (played first game with England and then with Sicilians) then Moors, simply because when fighting catolics with catolics you are pretty much forced to play with some form of straight on approach, thus
losing significantly more units in battles.

I was wrong about overpowerd Catholics, you can defeat AI with a little
strategy and using your mobility to the max. But in multiplayer i really can`t
see how can any easter faction defeat any western. And they really made a mess with calvary vs. spears.