[Arryn]

Originally posted by incognito:
Personally, its hard for me to get past mass protected infantry with fire arrow archers in the background, but I gather this has an effective counter with high enough research, that makes it moot...

It does. I like to deal with this sort of thing by magic of 2 sorts. The first is ranged mass-destruction spells, such as Fires From Afar, that attack units in a province before there's even a battle. It also works well, I'm told, to whack commanders in enemy capitals. The other thing is spells specifically targeting individual commanders such as Wind Ride or Earth Attack. If an army has no commanders it will auto-rout. Else if it has very few commanders left, it will be much easier to target the ones that remain, once you are in the battle itself, and get the army to rout.

You do not always have to fight armies to defeat enemies. Trickery works too. I prefer to use KGB methods.