[Stryke11]

I rarely recruit arbalests, only in high resource provinces when I'm in a pinch. Since normal archers usually can't punch through Ulm armor, I usually build a castle on the inevitable cheap (i.e. unarmored) indy archer province and spam them. Their range is troublesome, as they tend to run in front of my "hold and attack" infantry to be close enough to hit the enemy.

I typically begin with the regular flail infantry for indys, and then move into the battleaxe infantry (reg and BP) if my opponent is heavily armored (Abysia in my current SP game) or the shielded flail guys (reg and BP) if my opponent has capable ranged troops. I love the idea of the pikemen, but haven't witnessed them ever do anything good. Aren't they supposed to push people away? How do the rest of you set up your differing infantry types? As was said in the other thread, I wouldn't mind ditching the shield/hammer guys and the maul guys and replacing them with a medium infantry guy with stratmove 2 and a short or broadsword.

I'm currently trying to jumpstart a blood stone factory, and I have 10 indy commanders and scouts searching in a province and in about 8-10 turns I have amassed a mighty 4 blood slaves and even without tax the province is pissed. I have blood on my pretender but he's occupied with searching sites in order to make up for the lack of magic diversity. In the blood stone guide it makes it seem like having 100 slaves by the time you reach Cons. 4 is reasonable...well...not with my guys it seems.

Is the main advantage of priest-smiths over regular smiths the fact that they are sacred and therefore cost less upkeep? I ask because it seems, with the random, that the regular smiths are better, and they are both the same relative age (with priest smiths going to be older in the next patch as per the previous thread). The 1H isn't really valuable for anything but the two new national spells. Plus the cost more to recruit, yet the consensus is that these guys are must haves, so am I missing something, or is upkeep really that important (sacreds get half upkeep, right?).