I take the easy difficulty options. Lance charging got boring for me fast, and horse archery is even worse. Honestly I think the mounted combat is the most tedious part of the game. I want to snipe the enemies as they advance, then mix it up in melee.
Except the game actively punishes that, by forcing you to be outnumbered at all times. Initially with arbitrary limits on party size (Take my money! Why won't you accept my gold!). Then to continue gaining renown you need to be horribly outnumbered. So it's not enough to take out 20 enemies in melee - you aren't allowed to distract them with men of your own. Which means you'll be fighting several opponents at a time, which is where their *absolute bs* ability to swing through each other...
Fortunately at high levels of strength and armor you can just spam overhead blows while backpedaling, tanking their hits for 0-2 damage. But that's *dumb*. Fun for a while, but a waste of the combat system. Parrying and shields are completely useless against three opponents, just wear armor and athletics and overpower them.
Sorry for the rant, and maybe I'm exaggerating. The obvious answer is for me to stop worrying about renown so much, and maybe mod away the party size and recruit limitations. Then I can spend my incredible amounts of money on hiring a proper army. Just like the other nobles do via magic!
Edit: So that I can set the difficulty to normal and have actual mid-battle duels where I have to react to an enemy's spring, then parry. While still remaining aware of the battlefield around me in case someone attacks from behind. That sounds fun, not picking off conga lines of unblockable damage.